QoTD: Life Lessons

[the_siobhan]

questionoftheday asks: Is there anything you learned as you grew up, and wish someone had told you, but no one did? What is it? (question submitted by moem)

My answer:

Oh my Goooooooooooooooood, so many things. I grew up feeling like I was constantly in trouble because "I knew better" but nobody would ever fucking explain anything to me. I was supposed to be smart so that meant I could just absorb it all by osmosis, right?

There are some really shit things about growing up in the age of zero privacy, but man what I would not have given for stuff like Scarleteen or WikiHow or Captain Awkward when I was growing up.

Comments

[greylock]

I've got Wikihow search-thing installed I use it that much.

Scarleteen just seems like a saucy Dolly Doctor for the 21C. I guess Canada had a version of Dolly Dr? Dolly was kinda a Teen Cosmo here? I'd be SHOCKED of Canada didn't have something similar waaaay back when.

[the_siobhan]

I've never even heard of Dolly Dr.

[greylock]

Everyone read it back in the day (my day being the mid-late '80s). Was in my head 'cause of this:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-30/as-dolly-doctor-girls-told-me-their-secrets-heres-what-i-learnt/10317910

Now I think about is (because Australian Cosmo is shutting down and I was reading up on the history of magazines, you might have been a good decade or so before there was anything similar on the news stands.

[katyakoshka]

My parents gave a lot more support to my brother because I was supposedly smart enough that I could figure out what I needed to on my own. I also could only apply to the two closest University of California campuses when I graduated a year early because I couldn't be trusted to take care of myself adequately... which was probably due to them not, you know, actually talking to me about things, and just assuming that, indeed, I would absorb things by osmosis, because even though they hadn't learned that way, somehow, magically, I would.

...

I'm trying to recall if I told either one of my parents that I got EC and an HIV test all on my own (of course, needing such would have just proven that they were right... never mind that I took care of it on my own, regardless).

It's amazing how people rationalize their failing you as your fault, eh?