I fell on my feet and found my bearings because of these. I could talk to them. They listened and answered, for or against, but always weighing what they had heard, unlike my mother, who used language for manipulation, not to express an opinion or state a fact. What sounded like a fact might be a lie, and every opinion was tailored for the moment.
In class I was out of place because I could so easily be distracted from concepts by metaphors and facts. Clearly, I was less intelligent than I had hoped, and I felt frustrated by an inarticulate notion that something was wrong if old material was processed as if the immediate past and the uncertain future had no bearing on it.