Look, just admit it: There's at least one thing that, now that you know, seems like totally obvious knowledge, but you somehow ended up not learning it until way later in life than everyone else. You can tell us. We're all friends here. As a former goody-two shoes and all-around late bloomer, I have had a lot of rude awakenings in my youth, and many more in my adulthood. This is partially because the school district decided to give us sex education for the first time in the fourth grade, and it was impossible to hear about the mechanics of just about anything over the sound of a classroom 9-year-olds cackling. This is also because I watched almost exclusively Dragon Ball Z and Charmed growing up, so if someone didn't make a direct reference to a drug or sex, then I didn't know about it until college. It's not like my parents wouldn't have told me if I asked; it just plain never occurred to me that I had knowledge gaps. It's been an awkward past decade or so for those of us who had many crucial bits of life information go over their heads.
Fortunately, I am far from alone in this struggle, and all of us seem to have survived despite it. We all have that one thing that we embarrassingly and unintentionally reveal that we are clueless about, and we can only pray that it doesn't come out in a job interview or a fancy party. But hey, if it makes you feel any better, we did a round-up of tons of people who are in your boat. Hopefully reading these will make you cringe a little less about all the awkward confessions you've made over the years (names have been changed to protect the ADORABLE):
"I think I didn't realize until I was 20 that the 'D' in the Disney logo was actually a D, and not a backwards G. But do you blame me?" - Kayla, 29
"I didn't know until I was 19 that women could masturbate. THAT was quite an interesting night." - Ellie, 23
"I didn't realize until like last month that John Lennon was assassinated." - Abigail, 21
"I was in my 20s before learning you don't pronounce the 'L' in chalk, walk, talk. Bewildered, I asked 'Am I supposed to say 'mick' for 'milk'?' My world was turned upside down." - Joseph
"My friend thought it was 'WACOMOLE' not guacamole until last week. She is 26. Also I learned how to make coffee when I was 26....ooooops." - Mary, 29
"I had no idea until I was 20 that 'background' had a 'G' in it." - Cece, 25
"Until I was 16, I had no idea what breastfeeding was or that it was even a thing people do." - Daniel, 19
"I didn't know you were supposed to check eggs for cracks before you bought them." - Lisa, 30
"I never took sex ed, so I thought boobs would like...inflate when a girl was aroused. And then I was talking later in life with some girls and I said that and they were like, 'WHAAAAT?'" - Liam, 23
"I literally thought until this year that narwhals were fictional creatures." - Patricia, 24
"I didn't know 'Beatles' wasn't the correct spelling for the insect until about 3 years ago." - Jack
"I found out what 'tucking' really meant a few weeks ago and have never felt more naive. I apparently know nothing about the penis. It can all go back inside the body!!!! Ahhh. Horrifying. Also, slightly more interesting than what I had originally thought." - Elizabeth, 28
"I didn't know that garbanzo beans and chickpeas are the same thing until really recently." - Molly, 25
"It wasn't until high school that I realized a certain children's song wasn't a first-person account of a sailor's out-of-body experience/existential crisis. It's 'My Bonnie lies over the ocean...' not 'My body lies over the ocean.'" - Jessica, 28
"I thought that Alzheimer's was called 'old timer's' until I was in college and I said to a friend, 'My boyfriend's grandmother is suffering from old timers.' And the record stopped and she was like, 'What?!' I guess I hadn't seen it written down. So embarrassing." - Anne
"I didnt know the northern and southern hemisphere had basically inverse seasons." - Michael, 23
"When I was 13 and in my prime, I woke up from a nap and thought I had pooped myself. I told my mom and she began praising me because I had finally become a woman. I started sobbing because at first I thought I was a 13-year-old gal who pooped herself but when my mom told me it was my period, it made the situation worse for me because I thought that meant I had a period everyday for the rest of my life. So fragile. So innocent." - Francesca, 22
"I thought Steve Carell and Steven Colbert were the same person for about a year." - Beth, 27
"Until my mid 20s, I thought the word segue was pronounced 'seeg' and as a result probably sounded like a Nazi." - Ben
"Nobody told me that people have sex for fun until I was like 16. In sex ed they just told you it was for baby making. I thought you did it like once for every time you had a kid and people were upset about 'trying' for babies because sex was terrible." - Amanda, 24
"Until the fifth grade, I thought the civil war was fought between North and South America...the continents...not within the United States....it made a lot more sense when I came to this realization." -Michelle, 23
Images: Universal Pictures; Giphy (5)
