For your reading pleasure, a short list of things I incorrectly believed for an embarrassingly long time:
That Vietnam is an island. (Korea, too.)
Why did I think this?
Vietnam is, of course, attached to the main Asiatic continent (as is Korea), something that's certainly obvious to anyone who bothers to look at a world map. But I was never one to stare at world maps, and I never really paid any attention to Vietnam until we started covering the Vietnam War in my U.S. History classes. History textbooks have a habit of visually isolating the countries they're discussing on maps, highlighting the country at hand while greying out surrounding territory. (Kind of like this.) This imagery, of the visually-isolated Vietnam, festered in my brain long enough that, after a while, my default sense was that Vietnam was an island. (Same goes for Korea, thanks to the Korean War.)
How old I was when I figured out the truth?: 21
In one of my senior English classes in college, we read Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, a semi-surreal book set during the Vietnam War, in which a soldier goes AWOL in an attempt to flee the war and walk all the way to Paris, forcing the rest of his squad to chase after him. Most of the book is revealed to be fanciful: the chase itself is dreamed up by the novel's narrator. In my ignorance, I assumed that the concept of "walking to Paris" was part of the novel's surreal nature. (Of course you can't walk from Vietnam to France! Vietnam is an island!) Luckily, before I had a chance to publicly embarrass myself in class, I happened to finally look up Vietnam on a map (and looked up Korea at the same time).
Scale of Embarrassment: 9 out of 10
It's bad. I'm pretty sure a friend of mine, someone I consider a good friend, was literally stationed in South Korea while I still thought this.
That the "Toyota Cruiser" was called the "Toyota Spaceship"
Why did I think this?
Sheer gullibility. During the spring of my freshman year of college, there was a boy I dated for about a month. He was nice enough on his own, but he and his friends were the kind of people who would tell harmless and pointless lies to unsuspecting people, and never bother to own up to them. Said boy drove a Toyota Cruiser. One day, I asked him what the model of his car was called. Straight faced, he told me it was called the Toyota Spaceship. I thought that was a weird name for a car, and said so. He somehow stuck to his lie, even after I pointed out that the decal on the back of the car said "Cruiser." I believed him, though, because why would someone lie about that? (In defense of my gullibility, this was also the age of the Nissan Cube and the Pontiac Aztek, so all bets were off when it came to car model names.)
How old I was when I figured out the truth?: 20
That particular lie percolated in my brain for probably about a year before I realized that I'd been the butt of a pointless joke, and that it was very unlikely that the model name for the car was actually "Spaceship." The fact that I was fooled for a year about the name of a stupid car isn't too embarrassing. The fact that, during that year, I innocently insisted to someone else that the car was called the Toyota Spaceship is a bit more embarrassing.
Scale of Embarrassment: 2 out of 10
In retrospect, it was an okay joke.
That you can't recycle paper that's crunched up in a ball.
Why did I think this?
In first or second grade, my elementary school teacher told this to our class. Our classrooms had one of those large, blue recycle bins up by the front door. We were told that it is very important to recycle, and to always recycle paper, but that recycling centers will only take paper that is still perfectly crisp and flat. (Paper folded in half was also okay.)
How old I was when I figured out the truth?: 16ish
God, it's so obvious now. My teacher didn't want any punk second graders throwing paper balls into the trash or recycling bins from 20 feet away. Instead of trying to enforce that as a rule, she just told us that balled-up paper couldn't be recycled, thus placing the burden on our own, tiny consciences. It's so deviously brilliant! I don't remember when I put all of this together -- it's not as though I lived by this rule for a decade, but more like I never put the mental effort into consciously disputing it. I was a teenager by the time I finally did. (Also, I think the environment took a hit thanks to this lie: I vaguely recall various law-abiding classmates righteously throwing perfectly recyclable balled-up paper in the trash.)
Scale of Embarrassment: 5 out of 10
Elementary school teachers, you wield greater power than you know.
That I had a very minor and mostly useless superpower
Why did I think this?
Stand two to three feet away from a doorway, stare at the edge of the frame, and unfocus your eyes. You suddenly see two doorway edges, and in that hazy space between the edges, you can see into the other room. I discovered this when I was around six years old. It did not occur to me that this was something I could do with my eyes all the time (not just to walls), or that it was the same kind of thing that you do when looking at those Magic Eye images. I was convinced that I was the only one who was able to do this, and that it was a superpower: I could see through walls, but only just an inch or so, and what I could see was kind of blurry.
How old I was when I figured out the truth?: 11ish
In the intervening years, I didn't exactly stop thinking that I had a superpower; rather, I recognized that my superpower was so limited that it was functionally useless, and so I just sort of forgot about it. It wasn't until I was nearing tween-dom, when someone finally explained to me how binocular vision works, that I fully realized that I didn't have a superpower after all. (As you can imagine, it wasn't a huge loss.)
Scale of Embarrassment: 3 out of 10
I'm embarrassed that I wasn't more impressed with my own superpower when I thought I had one.
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