If you've been following along with my writing, you'll know that I talk about my childhood and my family a lot. One of the things that comes up repeatedly is that my family encouraged some "strange" beliefs in me as a kid because they thought it was kind of funny. They totally let me believe that the moon followed me around individually because it loved me so much.
For years I never questioned that I was the "moon Princess." I never treated it like it gained me any special powers or anything, just like it was my job to be the one to talk to the moon and make sure it was in a good mood and knew it was loved. I treated it kind of like having a celestial puppy.
That moment when I suddenly realized there was no actual way this was a fact blew my mind - not only at how long my family could let an inside joke run, but at how much it proved I was gullible. I never questioned my parents, why would I? They could just ... lie to me like that? What? Mind. Blown.
One Reddit user asked:
What was your biggest mindblowing moment as a child?
And honestly I feel a little bit better. I guess we all needed to learn. Here are some of the answers I found most comforting.
Child Actors Exist!?
I thought that when there was a flashback in a movie with a younger version of the characters, they filmed it when they were actually that age, then just waited until they grew up to film the rest. I was not a smart child.
- kevo0088
The Hedges
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For me sarcasm. I always thought people were 100% honest all the time, and never believed people were lying to me, or had any notion of people being sarcastic.
I remember when I was retrieving a soccer ball in my neighbour's garden when I was roughly 7/8 years old, I had to walk back through a dense hedge. While I was walking on some of the branches of the hedge, he said "that's just perfect, try to break even more of them."
At this moment I just started breaking all of them genuinely thinking that's what he wanted.
... fair enough, maybe I wasn't the smartest kid on the block...
"Where Do The Heads Go?"Â
That dead bodies are buried whole, and not just the body apart from the head. I just always assumed that the word "body" only meant your lower body and did not include the head.
I ended up making my aunt laugh at a funeral when she told me: "This is where they bury the bodies of deceased people", to which I responded with: "Ok, but where do the heads go?" She still tells this story every time she sees me...
Mom
Learning my mom had a name other than mom, and that all moms weren't just automatically given the legal name mom when they became a mother.
Sacrificing For Your Art
I couldn't understand why people wanted to be actors. I thought that once you died on screen, they killed you in real life. And then I saw the same guy in a second movie after he died in a previous one, and it all clicked.
- stengebt
"When Will I Start To Change Color?"Â
I have a half brother who is 8 years older than me and black. I am white. I always assumed that i was going to become black as i got older. I remember asking him around age 9 "when will i start to change color?" and him telling me its not how it works. Mind was blown and i was very disappointed.
Ignorance
My grandmother claimed the computer mouse was electrocuting her and she didn't want to use it. I was perplexed, because obviously it was not and if she tried more she could tell. She refused. She never learned to even turn off our computer.
I think it was the first time I saw real ignorance from an adult I respected, and it lowered them in my eyes. A little bit of youthful innocence died then.
- yokayla
The Wonders Of Space
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Learning that our sun is just another star.
For me, it was when I found out that we live on a planet. It made me feel really small and kind of creeped out. Like maybe we're the aliens.
Same! I had already known that "Earth" was a planet, but I didn't know we lived on it, I thought we were just on the ground and Earth was one of the planets in the sky.
Nobody Has The Answers
My mom broke down a bit during the divorce when I was ~13. She told me "I don't know what we're going to do, we might have to move, I don't know how to make any of this work, but I'll always keep you safe." That's when it really hit me that all of us are just doing the best we can, nobody has all the answers, and a whole lot of this life is just figuring it out and doing the best you can as you go. In the course of that year that followed, lots of the pieces about who I wanted to be, what kind of person I wanted to be, and what kind of difference I wanted to make started to fall in line.
Lessons From Pompeii
Learning that children could die. I was 4.
We were in a hotel and we were watching a documentary about Pompeii, and it showed a clip of mothers with their children running from the pyroclastic flow with a narration describing the agony with which these thousands of people died.
I asked if the kids died too.
My mom told me that they did.
I thought only old people and soldiers could die. It just didn't connect that people could die as children. I think it was because I still believed in God back then, and thought that he wouldn't let that happen. It didn't make sense to me.
Wanna jump off the bandwagon? Then keep reading!
U/lit3rallyuseless asked: What doesn't deserve the hate it gets?
​Film and media are probably the biggest contender for being hated on randomly. It may seem harmless, but not always deserved.
Actors are people too!
Actors who played characters that people didn't like.
Really if you hated the character then the actor did a good job (assuming that was the role).
The best cartoons.
nice day summer GIF by PBS KIDSGiphyChild cartoons. Some are actually really good, even as an adult.
I feel like watching cartoons aimed at generally a younger audience allows for you to be reminded of some life lessons, I know I forget some things, or didn't realise others, or it at least partially renews my awareness of something I should still like or appreciate
This doesn't deserve awards, it's just my opinion that is apparently shared by many.
This man did nothing wrong.
Guy Fieri, he literally is the nicest person in the world but since he looks like he was electrocuted by mountain dew people want to saw his head off.
Even before that, I was witness to his other charitable work. A few years back, Santa Rosa was hit by some terrible fires and he showed up at a few shelters and personally cooked up and served some killer buffet food. No cameras, no massive team of PR, just a dude with an assistant to keep him on schedule to hit up other shelters in the area. Guy Fieri legit earned a lot of respect in my book for that.
You know who DEFINITELY doesn’t deserve hate? Animals. They’re just living their best lives, and need to be left alone.​
The best cats.
Black cats.
We got a black cat for the first time last year. I've since formulated the theory that black cats might get some of their reputation from the fact that people can't see them well in the dark and so they seemingly appear out of nowhere and they might be instinctually cautious because they know people have a tendency to kick them while walking in the dark. Our black cat is the sweetest cat I've ever known.
They get a bad rep.
Discovery Sharks GIF by Shark WeekGiphySharks. They are beautiful, complex creatures, deserving of respect and, like any wild animal should be left alone in their natural habitat, but they get this reputation as vicious bloodthirsty monsters. This is only because every shark attack is news, and only then because they are so rare. More people are killed EVERY DAY by mosquitoes than sharks kill in a year.
Any apex predator that has remained evolutionarily unchanged for hundreds of millions of years, whose existance predates TREES, is deserving or our respect and admiration. Shine on, you crazy cartlaginous fish, shine on.
So cute too!
Opossums. They're neat little critters. They eat tons of ticks that carry Lyme disease, (mostly) don't carry rabies because their body temp is too low, and they're the only marsupial native to North America! They get a bad rap because their first defense is to hiss and bare teeth, but failing that, they just play dead.
If you don't have the predisposition to hate them, you'll find they're pretty cute too.
E: this is about /opossums/, the north American species.
Kiwis, I feel for you, but this comment isn't about your possums.
​Hating on other people for just living their lives also seems to be a big contender for things that don’t deserve to be hated on.
This is so true.
Unemployed people. A lot of people genuinely are looking for work and did not want to lose their last job/it was beyond their control (like a layoff) but they get so much hate and called lazy by most people. I know too many unemployed people that are actually really trying hard. They definitely aren't lazy. (Not saying lazy unemployed people don't exist, but to be fair, so do lazy employed people too lol)
Leave the weather man alone!
Fox Raining GIF by Family GuyGiphyMeteorologists. They try their best to predict the weather based on patterns, models, and data. They're not perfect because predicting the weather is insanely difficult. When they get it wrong, I think we should go easy on them. It was probably an outlier result almost no one could have foreseen.
I've seen people get angry over the meteorologists for getting it right. Like they control the weather - it is their fault we are having rain, that kind of BS. Never made sense to me, but hey, I have plenty of relatives I clashed with growing up.
Please stop being d*cks to these people.
Customer service associates.
I hate when customers think that I, the minimum wage person forced to sit there and listen to them yell, am personally responsible for every policy they disagree with. Like, ma'am, if I had that much power and influence, I wouldn't be sitting here on a Saturday evening serving you.
Wholesome and necessary.
People don't deserve hate they give themselves when they are not doing too good at the moment.
I'm in a weird place and I didn't know I needed to read this. Thanks buddy.
If you haven't heard it from anyone else today, I'm proud of you.
It seems like people hate on things simply because they think they're meant to hate them. But you can always be the change and make an effort to stop being an a**hole about certain things.
No matter what though, sometimes haters gonna hate