“Superior”

When I was 15 I was told by my 'friends' that I acted superior and put others down. And perhaps I did. But, as a 15 year old, I was not willing to walk on eggshells around my friends. In my mind, I was entitled to my own thoughts. It felt like an attack on the very nature of who I was.

The thing was, these people were my only friends. It was a small highschool. Only about 300 kids in total. Everyone fit into a specific group, and those who did not remained friendless.

I was not deterred by these facts. I wanted to surround myself with people who appreciated me and what I had to say. My intellegence was comparatively high, and I was raised to be strongly, almost stubbornly opinionated. These were things that I was simply unwilling to compromise.

From that friend group, I only remained friends with one girl. We'll call her Eleanor. She was more open minded than the others in that social group. Eleanor was not the kind of girl to burn bridges. She'd just build a gate so that she could close herself to you if the need arose.

In my efforts to keep this friendship, I bit back many observations and inflammatory comments.

"That's actually not true, Kronos was most definitely not the god of time. He was the Titan who fathered the Olympian gods and then ate them."

"No, a fish isn't a species, uneducated fool."

"What dumb fuck wouldn't get their child vaccinated."

"You. Cannot. Be. Allergic. To. A. Smell."

All of these were things I most definitely wanted to say, but couldn't because I did not want to make others feel inferior. Which sounds really prissy and rude, but I'm not the one who said it. Eleanor was.