Except for school I never went to any institution as a kid. No nursery, no kindergarten, no after school programs. Both my parents worked part time, so there was always an adult at home. For most my life I felt sorry for the kids who had parents working 9-5 and having to be in institutions and getting institutionalized.
I was well into my 30s before my wife explained to me why I was wrong. She was studying for these kind of pedagogical jobs, and while following her education on the side line, it really turned on a light bulb in my head: I was wrong.
While the home-raised method might have worked decently when I was a kid when more people did it, it would absolutely not work today. Most of my own issues throughout childhood and later basically also comes from not socializing enough as a kid. My own kids have been through the whole institution process because both my wife and I have had 9-5 jobs. Due to this, my kids are much better developed to tackle the world that they live in, and they have not lost any off the ability to think freely or anything that I previously believed was the negative effects of being raised in institutions. Of course there are some institutions that are better than others, but overall, their personel are a lot better educated to handle it than someone who has no education on this and only believes in “what was good enough for me…”
Even today, I sometimes meet people who want to home school their kids and such. While that might be a good idea in certain cases, it’s almost always done for the wrong reasons and without regard to how difficult it actually is if you want the best for your kid.
I thought lizards lived everywhere, and didn’t know until I was 18 that Oregon was on the west coast of the US, I thought California ended where Washington started and that Oregon was inland (we did not have geography in school).
When I finally went to college as an adult I took a world geography class as an elective because I felt so incredibly ignorant. Now, even years later I can help my kids with geography, quite a bit of it actually stuck.
I learned that the lowest point in Canada is a hair farther south than the most northern part of California
And that 50% of Canada lives below the 49th parallel
I used to be kind of low level anti-pharmaceuticals. Nothing too dramatic (never antivax), but definitely quietly on the side of other forms of interventions of any kind being preferable over drugs.
I still acknowledge that in many instances other interventions can be better, but in a lot of cases a pharmaceutical intervention is the quickest, most effective and safest way for people to deal with whatever health or mental health conditions they have. And also lots of drugs are perfectly safe over the long term.
I think I was raised with a lot of ideas around purity, but when I came out as trans is when that started to change in a big way.
Opening bananas.
Watch a nature documentary showing me a monkey knew better.
That if you weren’t part of “our” religion (my family’s religion, Catholic), you were basically living your life wrong and were an awful person. When I went to college I met people who believed different things, including in nothing, and I realized they were not, in fact, terrible, almost subhuman, people. I quickly changed for the better and that’s one of the best things to ever happen to me. It’s amazing how accepting you can be when you just accept people for who they are
Three of my cousins are sisters in the same family. All three are vegans, just one of them militant.
While we enjoy the two happy vegans and their great families and their joy at sharing their chosen lifestyle, we get no judgement from them; unlike the militant sister who reminds us we’re all going to a kind of hell on earth of our own making and we deserve to be sick for eating creature-flesh, etc.
Your comment reminds me that beliefs other than religious can be used by over-eager proselytists to judge and belittle people. And yeah, she’s so off my friends list.
Thinking the words, “just calm down” in the heat of an argument with my wife will actually work if I just try it enough times. Mathematically it should but it seems math doesn’t care about that.
Yes, I’m still learning that. Also giving emotional support instead of trying to fix everything instantly is difficult.
Being Mormon.
They always told us that people who gave us anti-mormon literature just made stuff up and it was Satan’s way of tempting us. They said to never take any anti-mormon literature and if someone did give it to you then to throw it away without reading.
But at the same time they taught us that the Mormon church was the true church. And they also taught us truth was absolute. Well, i figured if truth is absolute, and if the church was THE true church then it would be able to withstand any criticism. So i read anti mormon literature, like the CES letter. From there i did my own research about various things and found that the Mormon church made up a lot of stuff and did lots of gaslighting.
There was some specific issues that i also had been struggling with, like their treatment of women, gays, and black men/women. That also helped push me to want to make sure if the Mormon church was really true. And it wasn’t. Now i can love my friends unconditionally.
Good on you for challenging beliefs and forming your own opinions. Not easy to pull yourself out of these things.
That my dad cared about or respected me. After a family dinner, my wife asked me if he always talked about me like that and it just kind of clicked. Things like telling my kid, “If you play too many video games, they’ll melt your brain like your dad” or “why would anyone pay you that much” when I told them that I broke a six figure salary. She made me realize that this wasn’t normal and I didn’t have to sit there and listen to it just because of who he is.
I haven’t spoken to him or really any of my side of the family in almost two years now. Good riddance.
I thought Brussels sprouts were baby cabbages until I was 28 and I finally saw them still attached to the stalk.
If it makes you feel any better, you were actually almost right. These days the brassica oleracea has several well-known cultivars, including Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, kale and kohlrabi, all of which come from the same species of plant.
Also, relevant xkcd.
Raised conservative christian, took a disgustingly long time to lose some of my shittier takes
Don’t beat yourself up. Seriously.
I was able to break free early partly due to how absurd the hypocrisy became. My mother was going to hell, not because she’s a cold narcissist, but a Jew and a ‘practitioner’ of new age bullshit. And my father saw nothing at all wrong with this type of belief.
Not to mention he was pretty racist (though in a ‘subtle’ way), while helping raise my adopted Korean sister.
I was lucky that he and my mother were such atrociously bad examples of how to deal with others, that I vowed to never be like them.
Same. Lost a very good friend because I was too slow to change, lost my family because I did.
I was certain that a gander was a group of geese. Why? Because apparently everybody who has ever used the phrase “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” around me was using it wrong. I just learned this week that a gander is a male goose. So based on misuse, I thought that the phrase meant that what’s beneficial for one is beneficial for the greater group, but what it really means is that what’s acceptable in the case for one should be equally acceptable for others in the same situation.
I’m nearly 36 and I would say that I’m smarter than most people, but this was a gaping hole in my knowledge that was pretty damn humbling to learn of and correct.
I thought I was straight for about 17 years, thinking that also being attracted to men was just something everyone experienced.
Its nice to be allowed to have doubts about it too, without panicking, even though the final conclusion is that yes I consider myself straight. Its definitly not as binary as SOME people claim. And knowing that, I am also learned to be a lot less trusting of peoples world views and “common sense”.
It might be just because I’m relatively middle of the road bisexual, but I always liked the idea that most people aren’t quite on the extreme ends of the Kinsey scale, but like, a tiny bit bi at least.
I am definitely thankful for having a family that was very open about everything, and didn’t mind either way, though I do feel that the years spent not wanting to engage with the thought partially came down to pressure from peers, as anything other than heterosexuality seemed to be seen as alien back then. From what I hear from my brother, that actually changed a lot compared to when I was in school, and things are a lot more accepting now.
As someone at one of the extreme ends (though it can get complicated at times, male levels of testosterone make me slightly attracted to men) I also find the idea that most people are a little bi to be the case. In fact I didn’t realize I’d been attracted to men at all until I transitioned and that attraction went away.
Alanis Morisette is not the artist that did the “I’m a bitch I’m a lover” song. Meredith Brooks is the artist.
I found out because I had the song stuck in my head and I looked it up on yt. The comments section showed me that I wasn’t the only one who thought the song was by Alanis Morisette
LlllinkAlanis Morissette did the song named “Ironic” in which she gave a bunch of examples of things that were not actually ironic, which in itself is ironic.
Fun fact. Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins met when Foo Fighters were on tour with Alanis Morrissette. Taylor was drumming for alanis at the time.
I always think of “You Oughta Know” when i think of her.
I still think/hear “cross eyed bear that you gave to me” instead of “Cross I bare”
Hah! Up until this exact moment, I thought it was “The cross eyed stare that you gave to me”
I’m not gonna click on that link because there’s no way this is true. You can’t fool me.
Marshmellow is not correct. It’s marshmallow. I learned by spell checker. Only took nearly 21 years.
Fun fact, it was originally made from the roots of the marsh mallow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Althaea_officinalis
