For me, I had a long way to go before becoming conscious of the "silent thoughts" in my mind. When I thought with an extreme either/or language of thinking, I would think things like "I like being alone," which somehow translated to "I don't like being around people."

Up in my own head, I was setting myself for all kinds of interpersonal mess because of how I was categorising people and how I was thinking of them.

For example, you display some of this when you write something like a teacher can't be your friend, and a friend can't be your teacher.

These are just people, and they are more than one thing at any given moment. This depends on what you decide to "see in them," or project onto them. Your interactions with them depend on how you're categorising them.

What if one of your teachers looked at you as a friend too? Because the teacher might not consider themselves "a teacher" but also someone who is learning, and, when teamed up with others who are open to that same learning - that give and take process - they might consider the others who are with them on that, some kind of "friend."

We need to be incredibly vigilant with things like this, like reducing everything and everyone to what we think. The map is not the territory, after all, and what we think of a person isn't that person; it's us.