When I was 10 I thought Elton John was singing goodbye aubergine instead of goodbye Norma Jeane. To this very day I have great difficulty in understanding song lyrics :/

When I was little I thought girls had penises (I am male). In High School, I was very confused about reproduction and how it could work. The great part of living in a red state that does not believe in sex education. I was in college before I learned that women do not have a penis.

When I was really young, I naively believed that nobody ever die and that if they go to the hospital, they’ll come out all fine, just a bit older. It only took me to watch James Bond movie with my father to shatter that nativity when I realize that people can actually die.

I believed I was destined to become a bully. There were two older boys in the neighborhood who were jerks, and they were my “evidence”. I expected to turn out like them, because I thought being mean to little kids was just part of growing up.

Fortunately, I got really upset about it one day and talked to mom. I told her I didn’t want to grow up and be a teenager. I didn’t want to bully little kids. She reassured me that it didn’t work the way I thought it did.

I thought the old days were actually black and white!

There were a few (I was just a kid, after all)! And I’m embarrassed to admit this lasted until I was 11 or 12. I thought dying only happened painlessly in your sleep overnight, and only an unlucky few died in a hospital or accident or while suffering.

I thought everybody just went to whatever church was nearest to their house.

I thought only guys could fart.

To my perfectly logical child brain, regular milk came from white cows with black spots, and chocolate milk came from white cows with brown spots!

I never moved house as a young child, so I believed that when you wanted to move, you had to go find someone else who wanted to trade houses with you. It seemed like a very difficult process to find a person whose house you wanted but they also wanted yours.

I believed chinese/japanese ink was made from cuttlefish “ink”.

My brother told me and I belived for years…

I thought eggs were a dairy product because they were sold in the milk aisle and were also white.

I thought movies were real and they just literally followed people around with a camera for the events in movies. Of course, animated movies were a little difficult to resolve with this logic. So, I just figured there was an alternate universe where everything was animated and that’s where they came from.