1. It took me 45 years to figure out the ultimate response to people who say mean things to me: "I don't give a shit what you think. Your opinion means nothing to me." If I had been taught that as a kid, and learned to say it with confidence, my first 30 years would have been very different. There are things that were said to me in my youth that still hurt me to this day.
2. It took me 40 years to figure out that all love songs written by men are actually about sex.
3. For 50 years I thought my loyalty was a good quality, and I was proud of it. Then I found out that strong loyalty is considered a character flaw, a weakness, because it means that I am willing to follow (or believe) blindly and not use independent critical thinking or reasoning. I was very disappointed to learn this.
4. It took me until 11th grade to figure out that bullies are testing us to see when/where/how we will stand up for ourselves. One of my bullies actually said that out loud while tormenting me, "Why won't she stand up for herself?" My junior year in high school, I got into a fight. I won the fight. All the bullying stopped. I was raised to "turn the other cheek." "The bullies are looking for you to get all upset. If you don't react and walk away, they will get bored with you and go pick on someone else." This philosophy is totally wrong. If I had known that ignoring them was the worst thing to do, and fighting back was the best thing, I would have fought back once at each school that I went to. It would have made a fundamental difference in my school experience. Keeping my head down and being afraid makes you a target. Being a coward makes you a target. Holding your head up an behaving with dignity earns you respect. Standing up for yourself earns you respect.
5. For girls, when living in a dormitory, never invite a guy to your room for any reason, unless you want to have sex, because that's the only thing the guy heard. ANY variation of, "Would you like to come in for a drink, coffee, to watch a movie, etc., etc. are ALL a euphemism for "Let's have sex." If you don't want to have sex, stay in public, and say good night at the car.
6. That every woman wearing a hairstyle that seems impossible is actually wearing a wig or hairpiece. I had no idea that hairpieces were so prevalent. I wondered for years how they did that, and why I couldn't do it with my own hair.
7. If somebody doesn't like me, then no matter what I do, it's going to be wrong or not good enough.
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