I don’t know if this counts, but when I was little I’d go to friends houses, then later in high school to my first serious girlfriends house, and I remember their families were like… loving? I loved spending time at my girlfriends house especially, hanging out with her Mom and her Dad even if my gf wasn’t there. They were so nice, and you could tell had genuine affection for their children (and to some degree, me). I miss you Mr. and Mrs. Miller!
That’s me. I had no idea other families were affectionate and said crazy stuff like, “I love you.” My god, they even hug.
To this day I struggle with affection, even though I love it. If you touch me unexpectedly I’ll involuntarily flinch. I don’t mind, at all, but I still jerk and can’t help it.
I think my family was the same but I turned out cuddly, maybe the difference was the cats?
Heh that was my experience too. But I grew up with a single parent who spent all his time working, so most people’s childhoods weren’t spent climbing 5 floors of scaffolding for fun
Met my partner and was astounded by her loving family
That not everyone secretly wanted to be a woman.
Well, not the women, obviously, because they’re already women.
Lucky bastards.
Oof yup that was a doozy
Having a constant noise in your head/ears. It was so normal to me I didnt question it for many years. I randomly asked my friends about it one day and found out most people actually dont have an old crt tv like noise in their ears (and that its the disorder tinnitus).
In my case its not very severe thankfully, I dont notice it unless Im in a silent room or Im actively thinking about it.
Homophobia
I was raised in a right wing, rural area, and i didn’t meet a gay person til higschool. When he said he was gay, i assumed he was joking.
Im trans now lol
Dude tells you he’s gay, immediately turns you trans. The danger is real, people! 😭
if my grandma were to be believed my dad’s babysitter when he was 4 years old infected him with homosexuality then he passed it onto his children because one (me) is trans and the other is bisexual
She’s not very harmful about it but is just really damn confused lol
So if I get this right, your dad turned homosexual from his babysitter… Then proceeded to have two, presumably biologic, kids?
presumably biologic kids
Yeah, my dad fell for the “get a woman to protect you from same sex attraction” propaganda. Over the years he changed his mind and learned that it’s not something to be ashamed of, but he was in a relationship with kids now.
when I came out and my mom was very verbally abusive he kinda had the realization that the relationship wasn’t benefiting the children either. Also my mom was very very controlling over who he could talk to/make friends with.
He is currently in the process of a divorce after 22 years and is coming to terms with how he let fear control his life for that long.
It’s kinda sad.
Knee pain. Everyone told me it was normal growing pains, until one little league coach notice I run weird. Queue years of doctors and specialists and tests and scans and surgeries, and now I’m a 40 something guy with advanced arthritis that could have been much much worse if left untreated.
way to go attentive little league coach!
also wtf parents?
“Well it’s not hurting me so it can’t be that bad.”
This was a really recent realization for me. I am one of the people who can voluntarily activate the tensor tympani muscles in my ears to create a low level rumbling sound. I recently tried explaining this to someone else and they still think I am making it up.
Wait, not everyone can do that?! What the fuck?!
Fellow rumbler rejoice!
As I kid I thought it activated some kind of telekinetic or telepathic power so i’d keep doing it and gesturing at ping pong balls or candle flames
So sad to learn that it has nothing to do with psychic powers
Oh plenty of things:
having respect for others
being honest
helping the needy
fair pay for fair work
honestly considering others’ perspectives
loyalty
Basically every virtue I was ever told was worthy to embody has been used against me as a weapon or a tool
And of the hundreds of people I know IRL less than 10% give any of these internal value or even attempted to put into practice
And here I’ve been a sucker all my life doing the proper social contract thing because I don’t like the way the world is shaping up and getting CONSTANTLY bent over for it
Also: aphantasia
You have no idea how pissed I was to find out all of you had a fucking superpower, would have been nice to learn this before I wasted 3 years at graphic design
Excruciating period pain that would leave me fainting and vomiting every. Single. Time.
“Every girl goes through this” said the doctor, convincing my parents that I was just “dramatic”.
Turns out I had huge polyps growing out of control! Left scarring in my uterus and high-risk when pregnant.
Dealt with that hell every fucking month since I was 11 until I got onto birth control in my 20s.
My wife went through something similar. Took until she was in her 30s and we were pursuing IVF for someone to take her seriously and actually do the investigation to realize she had crazy scarring from endometriosis causing all kinds of issues.
It’s insane to me how much the modern medical community seems to normalize or straight up ignore this shit, like you said.
I realize we could have pushed harder, but when multiple doctors tell you “yeah, some women just experience periods differently, here’s 500mg Naproxen to help you through” you tend to believe it.
Sucks when doctors just assume things, it can cost lives.
It’s barbaric. They assume that if you’re girl/woman, most problems are basically “female hysteria”!
Not even “it could be [blank], you might want to keep an eye on that and report back if it doesn’t go away.” Nope! Diagnosis: dramatic.
And women die from this shit. Or become disabled / handicapped. Or it affects their long-term future if they want children. It’s awful.
Some people did a thing with a specially configured tens machine where the woman would turn it the levels up and up until it was at the level of their normal period pain and then the man would go through the same levels stages and be gasping and writhing before it got there.
Turns out men have been massively underestimating period pain for centuries.
That said, some women experienced far, far higher levels than normal and were encouraged to take that data to a non-dismissive healthcare professional.
As a dude, I want to believe that it’s less than it is because that’s just wholly unreasonable that women have to put up with that.
They’re were a lot of men who insisted on immediate medical attention who got told that their partners had tried that and absolutely nothing would come of it.
Getting locked in the basement without water, or thrown out into the streets for half a day, when you misbehaved as a child.
I mean, yeah? Is that really so bad. I guess it depends what the intent was. The town I grew up in was pretty tame, and the room I’d get locked in without food or water if I’d misbehaved had books
I was locked outside of the house for long periods of time and had to drink from the garden hose / garden faucet, and pee in the bushes. We also had like 10+ apple trees. It wasn’t that bad. A bit boring sometimes.
But that’s because it was outside and I could get my needs covered and meet friends.
Locked inside without these needs covered for extended periods is a lot worse in my opinion. Even cats and dogs have those needs covered.
It’s also about the lack of freedom when locked inside.
I would not treat my own children like I was treated, and especially not like you were.
Yeah, I just remember it being boring too. I’m also not really a person who can’t go a few hours without water, so I never felt I was being neglected.
I dont think I’d lock my kid indoors, but I do admit that when it happened to me after I’d been fighting my siblings or something, it was just treated as a time where I would chill out and read a book to wind down. Once dinner was ready, I’d get called for dinner, and everything seemed normal.
So I’d probably try to create a cool down zone with my kids if I ever have them, maybe a comfy chair they’re not allowed to leave for a few hours?
Children (humans) should always have access to clean water. That is not normal in the slightest. A time out shouldn’t include torture.
Today you are learning it’s not normal to lock children away with no food or water.
My first long term relationship was with a woman who could orgasm from penetration in less than a minute.
After like an hour of foreplay, right?
…Right?
Nope lol
She had the shortest fuse I’ve ever seen
Apparently, it isn’t normal to just space out during a test. Yeah, I went through K-12, undergrad, and grad school with an undiagnosed learning disability. This was only one of the symptoms…
wait, it isn’t normal?
I’ve never been diagnosed with a learning disability and I would often space out sometimes during a test. The brain gets tired and needs a break/reset before going back to the task. Now, if it was constant or for long periods of time, maybe that’s different? I’m not a doctor and this person didn’t specify.
I remember one day realizing it was odd that my dad would hug my mom but my mom would never hug him back. She would just stand there and let him hug her. Yeah he was an abusive husband and I was very happy for her when she finally left him after over a decade!
Social democracy
In general the political system you grow up in seems to becomes a normalcy in your mind when in reality there’s so many different ways of governing
Most fish probably never even realize that water exists till they are yanked out of it by the fisher’s net
Not everyone has tics they must surpress while in public.
