• lohky@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • nickiwest@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I recently saw a shirt for sale online that says, “I’m sorry for everything I said when I was evangelical,” and that really just about sums it up.

    • Firebirdie713@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 months ago

      Fellow former conservative christian here, and I share that pain. I eventually came around thanks to a LOT of patience from friends who understood my background.

      I try to pay it forward by putting myself out there and extending a hand to anyone looking to understand and accept others. I have had decent success with anyone who asks in good faith.

    • dethedrus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • Machinist@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I didn’t figure my way out until I was in my 30s. Been out of it for over a decade.

      I was brainwashed, my head was full of carefully crafted indoctrination. My extended family will almost certainly never be free of it.

      We were subjected to an evil process from an early age. It’s not our fault. Losing the hate and guilt is also a process. Go easy on yourself. Takes a tough person to change their entire worldview. Only a few of us make it out.

  • ResoluteCatnap@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    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.

  • Legge@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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

    • DandomRude@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 months ago

      It could easily have been the same for me, as my father is a Protestant pastor. Fortunately, my family has always been very tolerant and open-minded. That’s how my parents brought me up, for which I’m still very grateful to them today. It’s good to hear that you’ve found your own path, which certainly wasn’t easy. Respect, my friend.

  • MrVilliam@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

      • MrVilliam@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        No, it’s more like “if Larry gets a 10% grade reduction for turning his paper in a day late to you, then I shouldn’t be getting this 20% grade reduction for turning this paper in a day late to you.” It’s more of a call for things to be fair and give everybody equal treatment.

        There was a recent court decision regarding Donald Trump that, more or less, appointing a special counsel for the purposes of DOJ impartiality is not constitutionally acceptable. As a result, Hunter Biden, who was investigated and prosecuted via special counsel in order to maintain impartiality from the DOJ since his father is the sitting president, essentially argued that “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” Meaning that if Donald Trump should have his case dismissed under the pretext of special counsel being an invalid idea, then so too should Hunter Biden. That decision was already generally seen as fucking silly, but the silliness was put on full display for partisan hacks and their audience.

  • Peruvian_Skies@sh.itjust.works
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    2 months ago

    I was wrong about who I was for several years. A pretty unexpectedly intense DMT trip set me right

    EDIT: This isn’t really the ideal place to elaborate on my experience, but thanks for the interest.

  • LouNeko@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    For the longest time I was under the impression that everybody has unlimited potential, that you can essentially take a homeless junkie of the streets send them through college, give then a job and have a functioning intelligent person come out at the end. That is absolutely not true. based on my own experience we all have limits and glass ceilings. Yes, we all live on the same clock, but some of us have to deal with so much behind the scenes just to stay afloat while others can breeze through life like its nothing. There are people who are incredibly academically gifted but absolutely inept in personal or household stuff, some people are thick as a rock but incredibly charming, etc. We all have our strengths and weaknesses but sometimes of course all the marbles roll into the right holes and you get somebody who’s good at everything they touch and are almost doomed to success.

    There are just things that I will never able to grasp, or habits that I will never able to form because I tried my whole life and it never worked out. I consider myself as a fairly baseline dude, so its safe to say that if I have these experiences the majority of people will have them as well.

    • rekabis@lemmy.ca
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      2 months ago

      A large majority of that is winning the luck lottery of which family you were born into. Most people who have “trouble staying afloat” are also those who are economically disadvantaged… as in, in the lower-90% of the economic population who are desperately just treading water. Most of the people who “breeze through life” have the intergenerational family wealth that permits this behaviour.

      • LouNeko@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Yes, that has also been my experience. But this also evens out fairly well with age. I’ve come across very well put together people in their 50s and 60s whose childhood all the way through late adulthood has been literal hell. But this might be survivorship bias.

    • Akasazh@feddit.nl
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      2 months ago

      For me it was that other people think in the same manner, basically. But it turns out that brain usage is very different for people. So some people use more of their visual cortex for maths, making them see color in numbers.

      In this video Richard Feynman explains it better then I could.

      https://youtu.be/Cj4y0EUlU-Y

        • Akasazh@feddit.nl
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          2 months ago

          Yeah that’s his talent, such an amazing man. If you haven’t, read his biographie.

          The video is part of a longer series ‘fun to imagine’ is really with it watching them all.

    • TriflingToad@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      So you’re telling me we can’t just steal a baby from one of those secluded amazon tribes and force them to learn the quadratic formula so I don’t have to? there go my weekend plans :(

    • DandomRude@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 months ago

      I know that I know nothing, said Socrates thousands of years ago. So I’d say it’s beyond clever to teach yourself things and learn from your experiences. That is very smart in my book.

  • bstix@feddit.dk
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Funny, in American English, “institutionalized” means “sent to an insane asylum”.

    • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      I think this is compounded by the fact that many of the social institutions that used to exist are also greatly reduced, and children are expected to be much more structured now than they were. Used to be that kids could reasonably be expected to walk to a library or playground on their own, or play with neighborhood children, without being constantly supervised. (And yes, bullying happened, and yes, so did the Atlanta Child Murders. But the former was a much more realistic problem than the latter.) Kids were also going with parents to church, parents probably had some kind of social outlet, etc. There was, in general, more community. (I’m not bemoaning the loss of religion, since I think religion is trash, but I do miss the community that religion helped build.)

      And yeah, most people I know now that home school kids are doing it to ensure that their kids aren’t exposed to ‘dangerous’ ideas.

    • tyler
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      2 months ago

      Such a dumb pronunciation. Cool word though.

  • sodalite@slrpnk.net
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    2 months ago

    only ever read the word cyan and eventually learned I’d been pronouncing it wrong my whole life when i said it out loud in conversation

        • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          2 months ago

          I pronounced it like cayenne pepper until someone corrected me. But I learn a lot of words from reading them before hearing them. HEJeeMOHnee.

          Related, Celtics (soft C) are a basketball team, Celts are a ethnic demographic and a Selt is an ancient kind of knife.

          • dgmib@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            I also pronounced cyan like cayenne as a teen….

            Except I was also cocky enough to think I was right and found out when I “corrected“ a classmate who was pronouncing it “wrong”.

          • kurcatovium@lemm.ee
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            2 months ago

            Same here. I grew up in time and place where english was almost non existent for normal people. Then computers came, but they were gray bricks with no sound output outside PC speaker “beep beep”. But the language was there already. For many years english was just written form with zero pronounciation for me. And once we finally got teacher that actually could speak (and who wasn’t one lecture ahead of us) it was almost too late. That’s why I uderstand quite well, especially written text, but once I have to speak myself… people think I came from stone age or something.

    • neidu2@feddit.nl
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      2 months ago

      Same problem here, but with “Yosemite”. As a scandinavian I have no basis for hearing it spoken, so in my head I pronounced it as if it was a very street way of greeting Jewish people.

  • ComradeSharkfucker@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    I thought I’d live a comfortable stable life pursuing the sciences for the sake of knowledge. I learned in the past year or two through studying political economy and climate science that this is pretty unlikely. These days idk what to do. I want to do something more useful, I want to help people but it all feels quite hopeless. It often feels like revolution is the only option but I fear it may even be too late for that. We are already past the point where hundreds of millions will die and be displaced. We are already past the point of inevitable severe famine and societal collapse in many places. We aren’t even accomplishing damage control and it feels like most people don’t even dare acknowledge it.

    • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      It often feels like revolution is the only option

      Well, first of all, that’s never gonna happen.

      But more importantly, the boring shit is working. China’s greenhouse gas emissions probably peaked this year. The US peaked ages ago. The world isn’t far behind china. Taxes on fossil fuels and investments in renewables will see us through this. By 2026 at the latest, every year will see decreasing global emissions.

    • dnick@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      If it makes it any easier, those hundreds of millions of people are going to die anyway, the only tragedy about it is that it’s from something we could technically prevent or mitigate, but most things are like that… Traffic, smoking, guns, unhealthy diet… The climate changing isnt really going to affect the earth, our short sightedness and ignorance will just make lots of areas we can comfortable live in now much less comfortable or unlivable entirely. It’s going to suck, but do what you can with what you have and just the fact that you know enough to care means you have something to offer.

      • ComradeSharkfucker@lemmy.ml
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        2 months ago

        You are vastly underestimating what will happen if we allow things to continue as they are. We are already at the point of severe famine and 100’s of millions dying and global emissions have continued to increase at essentially the same rate as before every year. Every day that we do nothing the list of dead grows longer. If I were to do nothing but watch then I would consider myself complicit. I think the worst part is that we all know exactly who is responsible but still somehow do nothing about it. I’m genuinely honestly shocked that we don’t see them all as the mass murderers they are. This cannot be a sane world.

        Despite this, I do appreciate the condolences.

        • Teppichbrand@feddit.org
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          2 months ago

          No, we are not past that point. Stuff can happen fast. Christianity becoming a world religion after being some strange hippy cult for few generations, the collapse of communist eastern europe without a war, noone saw that coming. I agree it looks grim and I’m not optimistic, but I refuse to give up just a few years after grasping global warming. It is not too late and becoming a doomer is not helping.

  • Blazingtransfem98@discuss.online
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    2 months ago

    Used to think that cis people normally think that they are girls or dislike their genitals, and that it was a phase I would grow out of. I didn’t, it just got worse and it was from browsing r/egg_irl and r/traa that made me realize that I was wrong and in-denial.