The Lies That I Was Told Growing Up

What lies that shaped you and affected you mentally?

This morning, I came across a post on X that talks about how gifted students graduated highschool without developing a good study habit. Somehow, I resonated with that as I grew up being told that truly smart people don't need to study and they just "get" it. Consider me silly believing in that but I did and even during university days, I still heard something like that.

https://x.com/GreeneElizabeth/status/1827465127156752528

It all began at the age of 3 - I already started my schooling, I was expected to know all sorts of things from politics to language and math. Most kids who grew up with me don't have ambitious parents like my mom and dad. Their goal early in life was simply ensuring me to pursue graduate programs since that means I was a step ahead of them. Like most ambitious Asian moms, she attempted to make a good portfolio out of me but like any other kid, I dislike "studying. I do love to read but sitting down isn't my forte.

My mom never taught me the "why" of studying, I was just tasked to memorize things until very late at night, sometimes as late as 2 AM. Then at school, while I was doing great academically and always in the top 5, most of my peers would say something like " I mean, if you're really smart, you don't have to study". Throughout my life that stuck to me and whenever I am attempting to sit down and study, I felt like the stupidest people on earth and even more during exam weeks, I always heard things like " oh, look at him/her, they don't really study and got a highscore" and so, I always felt some sort of guilt and shame when I studied.

Did I do well without studying or any attempt during exams? I did, especially the subjects that don't require much effort like history, economy, biology, sociology, language, informatics and religion but when it comes to chemistry and math, safe to say I did pretty mediocre. Like I know my way around it but it's almost impossible to get anything above 90 without any studying at all.

Even during my teenage days, studying wasn't really something I truly developed. I tried but I wasn't as good as my peers at the time. We all graduated and I got into the top 3 universities in the country pretty painlessly too. I felt like I wasn't studying that hard and at university, I breezed my way up but I was still surrounded by people who guilt and shamed me for studying.

During exam week, my peers would have come to me. They would listen to my lecture about any concept in plain and simple language. I loved it because it helped me refresh my knowledge of the subject. I did pretty well in them but the people I hung out with kept saying things like " oh, they don't study, and still got the same score as you are".

I wished I knew better then....

I got to know a few people who were growing up being told they won't amount to anything and developed an extremely great studying habit. I admired them so much since studying also teaches us the value of resilience, humility and persistence.Those valuable skills are important to have as adults because life is full of problems at every corner and those are values that could keep us sane.

The single lie that was never corrected somehow impacted my adulthood too as I really lack those things. It took me a couple of years deprogramming myself and learned that studying has no age limit too. It's a lifelong skill and it's good to develop a good studying method since the soft skills earned from those habits can be beneficial dealing with life's problem and stress.