Ask Lemmy

for men to wish to be a woman

That not everyone secretly wanted to be a woman.

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

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!

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.

Getting locked in the basement without water, or thrown out into the streets for half a day, when you misbehaved as a child.

Being unable to think of something without a prompt.

I guess most people can just remember things without sticky notes and calendars.

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!

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.

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

Not everyone has tics they must surpress while in public.

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...

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.

I grew up thinking it was normal for grown men to be attracted to little girls. My mother had a habit of pointing out random men who just happened to be around and telling me they were staring at me/thinking about how beautiful I was/in love with my/trying to look up my skirt. The way she talked about it made it seem like it was a common, acceptable thing.

Reading.

Or rather, how so many people seem fear and avoid it, or can't do it. Something like 21% of adults in the US are illiterate, and the majority -- 54% -- read at or below a 6th grade level.

I've been a sight reader probably since I was about six years old. I absolutely cannot look at any words legibly written in my native language and not understand them. You couldn't force me to look at words written in English and not digest them if you held a gun to my head. I fear no wall of text, no matter how tall it is.

It takes some effort to wrap your head around the notion that not only can most people not do this, but statistically speaking most or at least a plurality of people have to struggle or exert conscious effort to read and many of them are loathe to do so. And roughly one in five people simply can't. This did not sink in for me when I was younger.

I can't imagine having to live my life that way. You nerds have seen how much bullshit I write in a day; I'd go absolutely bats.

Reading.

When I got to high school I started taking book out from the library there. Over three years I took out about a dozen books that had never been read; they'd just been sitting on the shelves for years.

Mine are all pretty mild.

Everyone reading all the time at home. Pretty much every room had bookcases, full to bursting with books. When I was old enough to have friends around they all said how weird it was to have so many books.

My parents were really emotionally distant. I don't recall either of them telling them they loved me - or each other for that matter. No hugs or kisses. More than one of my girlfriends called me an emotional cripple.

Home-cooked food every night. We never ate out, never had takeaway. My mum was a great cook though so although my friends seemed to think it was weird I'd never had a MacDonalds when I finally did try it I didn't understand the hype.

Oh, and the poop knife, of course.

Long, skinny stools. Turns out it was because of a precancerous blockage.

gun assault survival training for kids

yeah, no, this is just locally normal

Growing up using a poop knife.

Sharing socks. My family used to have a sock basket next to our shoes. You didn't own your own socks, you just grab a pair when you need them.
I mentioned "the sock basket" offhand to a friend in elementary school and she thought it was crazy. That's when I learned that not every family has a community sock basket. Looking it up though, I find a couple reddit threads from people with the same experience (and people replying that it's weird) 🤷‍♀️

Not being able to see anything when closing my eyes and not constantly hearing a voice in my head. I have aphantasia and thought people were always seeking metaphorically about seeing things in their head.

I only more recently learnt that people actually hear things as well as in like an internal monologue. To me, the whole thing sounds exhausting.

Well, the feeling of one side of your hip being out of place. Then twisting slightly to snap it back.

It's hip displasia.

Growing up in a house with hoarder parents:

• Having absurd amounts of pretty much anything standing around in the house.
• Parents going through your trash and blaming you for throwing away certain things that were 'still good to use' (they weren't).

Child abuse. I thought it was normal to threaten children with violence for noncompliance. I thought it was normal to be afraid to misbehave or be suboptimal in school at the threat of violence.

Nobody "dresscoded" me at home. As soon as I was old enough to pick my own clothing, I could. What skirts or jeans or dresses I wore was my choice completely. My school also didn't care much.

Blew my mind when I realized how many other girls had to sneak out with their clothes because the parents had a rule against tight jeans or whatever.

I still think my parents were right with this one. The kids with the strictest rules were always those with the craziest outfits. Can't blame them, I'd have done the same.

When I was much younger: that normal people could see much further than me.

One of my oldest memories is going into a McDonald's for the first time with glasses; I stopped and read the entire menu, because I couldn't believe normal people could read it as soon as you walked in. I always had to get up to the counter to make it out.

I got a lot better in school after that!

Taking multiple shits every day, after a friend pointed it out that wasn't normal I did a lactose test and found out I've been lactose intolerant all my life.

Having near constant racing thoughts and always feeling like you have to work on something and if you don't it makes you anxious. I thought my boyfriend was the alien for being able to not think about anything at all and just chill and do nothing.

Looking at light or sky when I need to sneeze helps me sneeze quicker.

It's apparently something to do with Photic sneeze reflex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photic_sneeze_reflex

Being able to see during ocular saccades. I was surprised to hear in so many videos “your brain blinds you because it would be nauseating”

No it’s not ? It’s just blurry.

Also, apparently some people can’t consciously control the focus distance of their eyes.

Some people don't own their home. They rent it. Took me a while until I realised that we were the abnormal ones for owning homes.

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