"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
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.
Some that others have already said (hard work = success, trust cops), and off the top of my head:
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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)
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That "blood is thicker than water" and that your family will always be there for you/want what's best for you
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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.
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.
Men are logical. Women are emotional.
Such an enormous generalization and oversimplification. Very false.
"You're a boy!"
Lol
My parents said they would never get divorced.
Basically everything
Babies get delivered by storks
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.
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.
I love you
I think the opposite list would be shorter
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 .
I was never, at any point, as much of a child as I was told I was.
