What did you get told as a child that you realised was a lie as you got older?

If you work hard you'll have a successful life

God exists and watches everything you do and loves you while threatening you with eternal damnation.

When I was a little kid, I asked my grandfather what the bumps in the middle of the road (the reflectors) were for. He told me that it was so blind people could drive. It made perfect sense to me, and I believed that for longer than I should have!

"you're not going to carry a calculator with you everywhere"

"Girls desire a knight in shining armor to come sweep them off their feet!" — my pastor

For the longest time, I struggled because I was told all my life what a "woman's purpose" was, and my desires never lined up with that. Felt like a freak because I never desired romance, sex, or partnership with a man (or anyone else, for that matter). If that was my purpose, was I supposed to will myself to want that for myself? Was I doomed to be alone forever? Was I wrong to want to pursue adventure and things that I wanted?

If my desire ≠ God's desire (which was apparently union with a man at some point in the future), then my desires were.. wrong. Maybe/probably even evil.

So I fucked up my life trying to follow that and fit into that mold. I did things I never wanted to do because it was the "right thing" to do in the eyes of God.

After I escaped, I never really recovered. But.. I discovered a lot about myself.

I did bearded dragon rescues & fostering, I got into cosplay, learned how to sew stuffed animals, got some mental health care, rekindled my love for nature.. all by myself. I learned to love me and not base my worth on what other folks believe I should do or how I should behave. I don't have a partner who gets to dictate my personality. I got to grow on my own.

I'm still coming to terms with.. a lot of things about myself, but now I'm able to grow freely instead of being confined to such a small pot.

Don't let people define who or what you are, or what your purpose is in life. Only you get to do that. It's both terrifying and freeing, but you can do this.

get a good education and work hard and you will be rewarded.

• all colors can be made from red, yellow, and blue
• how an airfoil works
• language is immutable
• you won't always have a calculator in your pocket
• infinite growth is sustainable

That republicans are better on the economy. Nah it turns out they consistently screw it up by every measure.

That you should base your diet on carbohydrates, and minimise fat intake.

That I'd never have a calculator in my pocket

That I'd get more conservative as I grew older

Basically everything my mother ever said. I repeat a lot of it back to her now, and she always asks, “where did you hear such absurdities?”

That if a racoon saw you swimming, it would swim out to you and sit on your head and drown you.

My fully adult mother actually feared this was something that could happen to her children, and she warned us of this “danger” every summer when we were young.

I was raised christian so basically everything I was ever told was an absolute lie.

Me parent convinced a few of friends that the ice cream truck only played music when it was OUT of ice cream

When you grow up everything you write will need to be in cursive.

" you can be whatever you want to be"

Police are there to help

Christopher Columbus set out to prove that the Earth was round after eating an orange or something and that's how jesus discovered America

Over thirty years ago, I told a friend of a friend “Australians come from Australia, Romanians come from Romania, therefore Canadians come from Canadia”. She’s been calling it “Canadia” for thirty years.

We’ve been together for ten years now, and she’s just found out that it’s not called “Canadia”. Boy am I in trouble.

Everything's gonna be ok.

Trust me, I know what I'm doing.

You'll understand when you're older.

Some that others have already said (hard work = success, trust cops), and off the top of my head:

• That my ultimate goal in life is to find a husband, and carry and then raise children (people don't stop saying it once you grow up, you just hopefully learn that they're full of shit)

• That "blood is thicker than water" and that your family will always be there for you/want what's best for you

That turning on the light in the car at night was illegal because it would cause a glare on the windshield.

I believed this into my mid-20s when my husband corrected me with a fuckton of teasing and incredulity.

That you'll be nobody without a degree. Maybe not told directly, but implied in many things that my inferiority-complex-mom said.

I was told they'd always be there for me. Then my dad passed away a few years ago.

I still miss him.

Grandma adopted a puppy when I was probably 8 or 9. It got parvo. I remember going to her house and asking where the puppy was. She told me that he was sick, so he had to stay outside and I couldn't go outside for the same reason. When I would ask where the puppy is, she would tell me that he's on the side of the house where I couldn't see him. This went on for a long time, I never saw the puppy again and eventually forgot about it entirely.

A decade or two later I found out that my grandma had spent thousands of dollars trying to keep that puppy alive, but parvo took it anyways. She was very upset about it's passing and instead of having me go through it too, she lied to me about it until I completely forgot about it.

"maybe" was how my mother said "no."

"Ignore them and they'll go away" in the context of bullying. Hint; it took a mental breakdown and violence to make it stop, back in the mid-90s.

Anything having to do with Christianity.

Sitting in a hot tub as a kid will make you infertile.

Totally an old wive's tale. I looked it up when I was an adult and found out I had been deprived of tons of hours of hot tub time.

God is real.

Almost everything I was taught about nutrition later turned out to be BS

That chocolate milk comes from brown cows.

When I discovered the truth, I learned an important lesson about betrayal.

That truth is absolute. It's very much subjective. Much in the way right and wrong are subjective.

Life is complicated and things don't fit into perfect little boxes.

We're all equal.

To borrow from Animal Farm, "We're all equal, but some are more equal than others".

That people are stupid because they don't have access to knowledge.

The garbagemen did not come back looking for me every week. They just came to pickup the garbage and not to take me away.

Younger Cousin Syndrome...

“It doesn’t matter what they think”

We don't lick other people.

• My grandma always told me that if you push to hard while pooping your organs will come out. Technically hemorrhoids can do that but they are not really organs.

• Microwaves cause cancer.

Nothing good happens after midnight.

That talking to strangers was bad.

Men are logical. Women are emotional.

Such an enormous generalization and oversimplification. Very false.

It gets better.

My parents said they would never get divorced.

That the crust is the healthiest part of the bread

When I was being taken into surgery they told me we were going into space and gave me gas that they said was to breathe in space. I didn't realize I hadn't actually been to space until I was like eight years old or something like that. Probably older.

Basically everything

That a state can't print money

Babies get delivered by storks

In Catholic school in the nineties and early 2000's, we were all told that the sex abuse scandal was serious but that it was also "a small number of incidents." That we needed to pray for the victims and the souls of the perpetrators.

Then I went to college. Come to find out not only was the child rape widespread, not only did the church actively hide monsters from legal scrutiny, not only was this all directly effecting the local arch diocese (not my school specifically, but church leaders were forced to quickly rename another high school when allegations against a dead bishop proved too numerous to ignore)... not only all that but that it's still going on, just not in first world countries with robust networks of journalists and legal systems. That an alleged pedophile was (while I was in college) living in the Vatican, being directly sheltered from extradition by South American authorities.

I guess the lie was that it was all over. That it was a small problem. That the church was a safe place people could turn to. I left the church at 18 over it, became an atheist by 19, and that's where I'm at now at 35.

"You're a boy!"

Lol

Engine breaking braking destroys the engine.

Today: <Bing!> DO NOT ENGAGE CLUTCH ABOVE 1300 RPM.

I love you

There's no little tooth bugs crawling back my neck. Toothpaste just isn't healthy to ingest.

I think the opposite list would be shorter

That gender and sexuality and sex is basic make is mean female is girl and heteronormativity.

Fuck all that. I'm free from that bullshit.

That pulling levers in the basement furnace room wouldn't blow the house up. It wasn't until my 20s when it randomly popped into my head and I thought about it with my adult brain and was like "wait... Why would someone install something that would blow the house up?"

That animals are happy when you're about to eat them! (Just look at the marketing in your local grocery stores.)

People defend that indoctrination as if they have no choice.

Aside from the; obvious bullahit of relegion that you can figure out for yourself quite early .... not to be a bully to get what you want. It's near ubiquitous, from police to government, to wealthy people, business owners etc anyone with an asymmetric relationship gets what they want that way. As a boss, do what I want or I fire you and you starve etc etc.

I still see them pedaling the same lies to children today, bullying and cowexison are linked to inextricably liked to what we call success we are fine with it, the weird part is the denial and lieing to kids about not being a bully .

Not necessarily at all. Depending on where you live, anyway, but if you have supporting friends, you'll end up fine

I was never, at any point, as much of a child as I was told I was.

USA/Europe are good countries and liberalism is the way.