What is a little white lie you were told as a child, that you believed for too long?
I was way too old when I figured out a human couldn't actually get sucked down a drain or flushed down a toliet. I used to cling to my little brothers, and pull them out of the bath any time my Mum would pull to plug.
@RickiTarr mom told us the most bizarre thing as children, "If you sing at the table you'll have bad dreams". What a wonderful introduction to the sinister non-sequitors of my mom.
@RickiTarr Not really anyone telling me this, but the long-standing dramatic presumption of every single thing you do is remembered by an entire town and 30-40 years after high school everyone in town is "hip to your nonsense". Good people get lauded, bad people get shunned, and thats how everything is.
And 12-15 years after graduating high school, I returned to my former hometown and worked at the schools that I attended as a kid. Nobody cares.
You can take that as sad and cruel... Or take it how I did: incredibly liberating.
For those who are on the fence after high school and can't decide if staying local or going abroad is going to be worse... It's all going to change anyway. So be greedy and do what you want to do.
Leaving home won't change who you are or leave your emotional baggage behind, and staying home won't keep anything how it is or make you any less realized than those who go. It's probably the only time that you won't have any consequences for whatever you choose.
@Cefr Honestly the fact that most people don't think about me, was very freeing. I was such a self conscious person, and it helped me come out of my shell
@RickiTarr Grades 4-11: Dork. My entire deal was similar to Sam Weir from Freaks and Geeks, just put it in the 1990s.
Grade 12: Useful dork. Described myself this year as "social chameleon" who could move across cliques, but really, life after HS was scaring everyone I thought suddenly liked me. And the Graduation was the culmination of it. The silence from that point forward was all I needed to know.
Number of friends I was in touch with 2 years after HS: 0. I have no interest in changing that.
@4d3fect@RickiTarr a former lover was once told by her first boyfriend that Watermelons grew on trees and you could get a lethal blown to the skull if one broke off and fell on you .
She was from the Desert south of Owens Valley and knew nothing about how Watermelons grow so sure watermelon trees .
They we showed her pictures of how they grown and that they are basically tripped out sweet cucumbers
@RickiTarr not me but I had to fess up when my son was convinced his friend’s mom was the tooth fairy. 🤣 My brainwashing was more the religious kind that took until my adult years to fully unravel.
@RickiTarr the food ones are the ones I remember. Apple seeds, watermelon pips, cherry pits, etc., will grow in your stomach. If you swallow bubble gum, it will stay in your stomach forever. Any parent knows everything that goes in, comes out.
And banana "strings"! A teacher in junior high seemed quite certain that if you swallowed them, they'd get wrapped around your heart? We were all way to old to believe that, so it seemed not only she was certain but didn't understand anatomy.
@RickiTarr In second grade, in order to help cement subtraction rules for numbers with multiple digits, Mrs. W taught us that the big number always went on top and we couldn’t subtract larger numbers from smaller numbers. I was devastated when I learned about negative numbers via a TI99 game the summer after second grade.
My problem when I was a kid was that my mother would try to run these on me—and it was clear to me AT THE TIME that they were bullshit.
"Girls' arms are made for holding babies. Boys arms are made for throwing balls." (In fairness, she was trying to console me in response to a PE teacher's bad teaching + unreasonable expectations.)
I'da appreciated it more if she'd just been on my side that PE as constructed was abusive bullshit.
@staringatclouds@RickiTarr My human said they never got that watermelon they were promised. The seeds must have gotten wrapped up in all the chewing gum.
@RickiTarr great grandma and aunts always warned that if i cracked my knuckles i’d get arthritis later.
jokes on them: years of meatpacking and stevedoring ruined my wrists and hands for life. now the only relief i can get is by cracking my joints 🤣
@RickiTarr The old chestnut "If you keep making that face, it might get stuck that way!"
Tbf, I was always skeptical, cause I figured if it WAS true there would be a lot more people walking around with stuck faces, but I still worried about it.
It was actually the scene from Liar Liar where Jim Carrey is trying to prove to his kid that he can't lie that finally confirmed for me this was, in fact, a deliberate falsehood. As that was one of the questions the kid used to test dad's magic honesty.
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