Strange Misconceptions

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Indabayou

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As a child, or even now, have any of you believed something that turned out to be wrong to the point of absurdity? Here are a few of mine:

  • When I was a kid I legitimately thought Tony Dinozzo from NCIS was a Little Person. I don't know why, and it was weird when I finally learned he was an average sized man.

  • I thought that Abraham Lincoln was black because he was on the penny, and the penny is the only brown coin in the US.

  • Due to a very misleading children's book, as a child I thought Helen Keller magically got her eyesight back when the teacher took her to the waterpump and the water hit her eyes

  • Not me, but my friend from college thought the Irish potato famine happened because potatoes take a hundred years to grow. He was 20 when he said this.


So, what strange beliefs have you shaking your head at your younger self? Share away!​
 
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  • When you swallowed watermelon seeds, you would grow a watermelon in your stomach. My aunt told me that was how her stomach started getting bigger when she was pregnant.
  • Butt sex was when you bumped butts. Yes, I thought this until I was 14 and took sex ed. =/
  • When people died they just went to sleep and never woke up. Took me a long time to realize that wasn't true.
I think that's about all the ones I can think of at the moment.
 
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As a kid, I always thought that to get money, all you needed to do was apply for a bank card. *scratches head*
 
When I was a kid, I used to believe that I could only eat five gummy sharks at the store before getting caught.


I could have easily eaten six.
 
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The first time I heard the word "Nazi", I thought they were saying "nutsy" -- as in, calling the Germans crazy for what they did.

Like, "oh those nutsy Germans, trying to kill all the Jews. How criminally insane."
 
I thought that Abraham Lincoln was black because he was on the penny, and the penny is the only brown coin in the US.
This. Except I have no idea why I thought he was black.
 
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This. Except I have no idea why I thought he was black.

My perception is still skewed to this day. I know he's white now, but I still can't look at photos/drawings of the real Abe Lincoln without thinking something is off because of how pale he is xD
 
When I was a kid, my parents got divorced (I was like 6) and my mother got a new boyfriend a few years later. At 9 years old, I thought that once you saw someone naked, there was no way you could "unsee" it, and therefore could never break up xD or if they broke up, that he would tell everyone he saw my mother naked. WTF kind of kid was I, this is pretty creepy LOL
 
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  • My Parents: That if you work really hard, everything always works out.
Except, nah, it doesn't. You can be betrayed, or sabotaged, or stolen from, mother nature could strike, or so on. You could build the biggest, most sturdy house, but sheer dumb luck or mother nature's wrath or the government or some arsonist fucker could come by and completely fuck it up while you aren't there. Hell, perhaps even in spite of you being there. You don't get to control what happens to you no matter what illusion you may drape over your eyes to make it appear as such, you can only control how you react and what you do. Both in good times, and bad times.
  • Childhood: That sorrow, anger, and so on, are bad.
No. Not particularly. Sorrow and anger are perfectly healthy emotions, and they can get a lot of productive things done in the right hands. Sorrow can help someone stop to contemplate or express when something has harmed them to others, and anger can be used to express extreme dissatisfaction with an event or article. They're necessary emotions, and when expressed in a healthy manner, they won't harm you or anyone around you.

The only two emotions that I know are just completely awful in every respect are hatred and self-pity. There are no emotions more ugly than those. Hatred is to take anger and apply it so fiercely to something that you wish its destruction, and self-pity destroys you internally and makes you blame anything and everything other than the emotion itself.
  • TV as a Child: That your emotions are most important, and anybody who tells you that what you're feeling is wrong, is nearly always some evil mustache-twirling robot-deploying sunday cartoon villain.
Nah fuck that. Logic and reason are the greatest thing mankind has. Logic and reason are what put us above the other animals and into our own category. That's not to say that emotions aren't important, they are. It's just to put them in their rightful place, they aren't the be all and end all of human life, they're just a series of biochemical reactions in the brain that compel you toward certain activities which, in every case, can be explained scientifically. There is no magic to emotion, it's an evolved utilitarian tool. I love having them, and I would trade them for nothing in the universe, but emotions aren't capable of discerning complicated situations. They're just not. Look into a dark room and you'll feel a sense of foreboding. Hear something moving inside the room and you will feel fear. But if you struggle past that fear and turn on the light, it turns out, it was just your fucking cat going about the house at three in the morning.

If fear can be conquered, anger controlled, sorrow overcome, happiness kept calm, and excitement contained... Does that not imply that there are situations where such controls might be necessary? Situations you can discern through logically evaluating and reasonably assessing, perhaps?

I mean, I really wouldn't look much further than the flat earthers or the anti-vaxer crowds as to why "I feel" or "I believe" is inferior to "I logically discern" and "I reasonably discover."
  • Up until a few months ago: "There are billions of fish in the sea!"
Y'know, it's fully possible that I could feasibly find someone who will love me to the ends of my days. I'm a hopeless romantic, I dream about it sometimes, and it even reflects in some of my writing. Except, see, I don't really search for it anymore. I gave up after my last break-up, which was shortly after someone I had known and cared about for years put a knife in my back and left me to rot. Thing is, people will do whatever it is they do and convince themselves they're right about it. Ain't nothing going to change the self-righteous nature most people have.

That's not really a terrible thing, though. I think myself victim, but I'm sure others think the same of themselves, too, when on the opposite side. The feeling's the same, just the actions are different.

I figure if there's somebody out there who will one day eye me up and go "yeah, that's the one" they'll be thinking that based on what I'm doing. What I'm dreaming. What I'm building. They'll see "the writer" or "the guard" or something else along those lines. If I ever get someone to love, it'll be because they saw who I was and it appealed to them, not because I kept searching around blindly going "WHERE IS IT?!"

And, if there isn't anybody out there for me, if I'm truly doomed to a fate where the best I can do is to entertain someone for a few months before they move on and leave me behind... Then I should make the most of it, no? My life isn't defined by whether or not there's someone to cuddle with. My life is my own. I'll write stories and play games and exercise and kick ass at life, and enjoy it. No sense wasting it languishing in self-pity all my life, it's not like that's particularly attractive anyway.
 
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I used to believe that the reason why there's a Monkey Style in Kung Fu were due to Monkey's themselves knowing Kung Fu and would teach people. Rafiki that's why.

And that trees were dicks. Wizard of Oz.
 
And that trees were dicks.
Don't worry. Trees are nice. Trees offer the connection you need with Mother Nature.
 
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I thought:
  • animals in zoos were employed, and if you didn't see them immediately in the exhibit that meant they were on break.
  • the people in parades obviously do this for a living.
  • the post office owned teleporters.
  • there were special collars in the world that could translate what your pet is "saying".
  • Brownies took my socks.
 
As a child I believed a whole huge story my mother concocted to make me not feel weird about my ears. They're slightly deformed in that they didn't open up all the way like they're supposed to. The outer sort of ridge of flesh is called the helix, and at first it's fused to the rest of the ear and the comes apart to leave a bit of a gap. On my right ear that didn't happen on the very top, so that ridge just has a weird dip in it, but the left one is almost entirely still fused and looks kinda pointed because of it. It's barely noticeable if you're not looking for it, but my brothers made fun of me for it once they realized my ears were different. Typical asshole sibling shit, and I wasn't ever super phased by it because I had snappy comebacks for both of them, but it was one of those things that got irritating through sheer repetition.

Anyway, my mother noticed this and decided to flip the script. The story she concocted was that Santa had elves, but they weren't just random weird creatures. She said they were kids from certain special bloodlines, that all kids from them had a chance to become an elf. However, every once in a while kids would be born to those bloodlines that had pointed ears, which meant that they had much better chances become one of the elves. It was couched in typical Santa shenanigans of "but only if you're good!" and cast as a super awesome thing that every kid should hope for. It was just a silly little thing that I believed until I figured out Santa wasn't real, but it was a weird thing that was different from the standard Santa mythos and whenever I talked to other kids about that stuff I always had to inform them of the secret elf info. My mother got a huge kick out of that part of it, and the way my brothers and I spread that story to our younger sisters without her needing to do any work. It was a pretty good story given its initial purpose as just a "hey, your ears are fine, don't worry about it" thing.
 
As a child I believed a whole huge story my mother concocted to make me not feel weird about my ears. They're slightly deformed in that they didn't open up all the way like they're supposed to. The outer sort of ridge of flesh is called the helix, and at first it's fused to the rest of the ear and the comes apart to leave a bit of a gap. On my right ear that didn't happen on the very top, so that ridge just has a weird dip in it, but the left one is almost entirely still fused and looks kinda pointed because of it. It's barely noticeable if you're not looking for it, but my brothers made fun of me for it once they realized my ears were different. Typical asshole sibling shit, and I wasn't ever super phased by it because I had snappy comebacks for both of them, but it was one of those things that got irritating through sheer repetition.

Anyway, my mother noticed this and decided to flip the script. The story she concocted was that Santa had elves, but they weren't just random weird creatures. She said they were kids from certain special bloodlines, that all kids from them had a chance to become an elf. However, every once in a while kids would be born to those bloodlines that had pointed ears, which meant that they had much better chances become one of the elves. It was couched in typical Santa shenanigans of "but only if you're good!" and cast as a super awesome thing that every kid should hope for. It was just a silly little thing that I believed until I figured out Santa wasn't real, but it was a weird thing that was different from the standard Santa mythos and whenever I talked to other kids about that stuff I always had to inform them of the secret elf info. My mother got a huge kick out of that part of it, and the way my brothers and I spread that story to our younger sisters without her needing to do any work. It was a pretty good story given its initial purpose as just a "hey, your ears are fine, don't worry about it" thing.
If it makes you feel any better, my son has a similar problem with his ears. One ear is smaller than the other, the lobe is attached, and he's got an skin tab on it, plus a scar from where he somehow ripped a chunk of his earlobe off when he was little. The other ear is a bit more rounder, sticks out, and the lobe is detached a bit. When he was little we told him it was the world's way of letting everyone know he was special, but he didn't quite believe it.
 
When I was really young, I didn't know how to count beyond 39, and thought 100 was a grand, unfathomable number more akin to 1000. I was a little disappointed when I learned that after ninety-nine came one hundred, as opposed to 'ten-ty'.

I am still surprised that '101 Dalmatians' and it's counting scenes didn't tip me off.
 
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So I've always had this oddly heightened sense of smell and when I was a kid people would think I was strange because I could smell things they either couldn't smell or way before they smelt it. My brother used to give me loads of crap about it and he would hide garlic cloves in random places in the house and other potent smelling substances. It would drive me crazy to the point I would cry because I couldn't stop smelling things.

So my mom tired of my brother's shit told me I had a heightened sense of smell because I was a werewolf and just hadn't reached my transition time yet. My brother had a different dad so obviously I was the only werewolf kid because of my dad and I used it to terrorize him..... So you know I totally believed I was a werewolf until I was like 13... My primary defense when I was angry at people was to bite them because of that...
 
On a serious note, when I was about eight I think? I used to think that if you stayed out in the woods long enough you'd be able to talk to animals. So I packed up my things and took off for the nearest camping place (which was a ways into the countryside on the other side of the freeway, away from the town. I lived close enough to the part of town where it was scary at night but far enough where we didn't have a immediate threat of having cops storm our house). I stayed there for three days with my friends and became sad when I couldn't understand the squirrels.

I also believed that there was a creature living in my backyard, living under a huge pine tree. It ate eggs and the left over food I'd give to it. But I didn't dare go out during the full moon because I thought that it lived like a werewolf or something.

There was a time I believed in Santa, but to me the thought of a random guy in my house freaked me out so every night before Christmas Eve, I'd put tacks in the chimney. My mom of course removed them, but I always assumed it was what happened to Santa for trying to get into our house.

I was a fucking strange child.
 
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The only thing that jumps to mind is when I was little, I was walking with my parents and asked them how big the moon was. They told me that it was the size of the block, for some reason.

I didn't find out until years later in school my parents told me the arguably most useless lie in history.

I also legitimately tried to dig to China on several occasions in my sandbox. I always got to where I started hitting clay, then I decided I simply needed better tools.
 
1. I thought the word "sex" was a contraction of "sexy" (I was 8 years old. Ah, innocence. I remember being so confused at the time.)
2. As a child, I firmly believed my entire life was a TV show and that everyone was in on the secret. I thought that my parents, classmates, friends, etc. were all actors and actresses pretending to be normal people. A la The Truman Show. Not sure if I was narcissistic or just distrustful (why not both, though, right?)
3. I really thought, for a long long long long fucking time, that sex was a very bad thing that would get me to hell. And I was absolutely certain I would end up in hell. Even after all this time, even if I'm an atheist now, it's hard to shake that notion off completely.
4. I liked to mimic animal sounds as a kid, and I thought I was the only one that could do that. "Mom, check this out! *Barks* I think... I'm special!"
 
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