What is something silly you believed to be true as a child?

https://thecoffeemonsterzco.com/blogs/midnight-blogging/journaling-prompts

Growing up in Colorado, kids usually have a solid sense of direction as long as they can see the mountains. The sun always sets in the western skyline, obscured by the peaks, and to find North all you had to do was use your eyes to follow the range as far to your right as you could. You never needed a compass! (Unless you were hiking in the mountains, because duh.)

Well, this particular thing I believed (briefly) is from one of my earliest memories of traveling to see family who lived in Washington. I’m not sure exactly how my brain made these connections, but it involves something my older brother said some time before the trip. He said something along the lines of “once we get over the mountains they’ll be in the East instead of West” and my brain translated this to mean “on the other side of the mountains, East and West switch places, because the mountains are always to our West” right before filing it away.

So, little kid me, for a long while, just had this piece of directional misinformation tucked away in my brain. The mountains were somehow a magical dividing line for compasses and directions.

Skip to my family flying from Denver to Seattle, and I got the window seat on the right side of the plane. It was one of the rare times in the Pacific Northwest where the sun is peeking through the clouds and lighting up the western slopes of the Cascade Range. I saw the mountains and excitedly pointed them out to my brother. It was then that I thought to regurgitate what he had told me previously, probably in an effort to impress him, and said something to the effect of “look, the mountains are to our West still because like you said, once we get over them East and West switch places!”

He looked very confused and tried to re-explain what he said before, and after it all clicked it left me feeling a little deflated and defeated for the rest of the flight.

I didn’t have to believe it for long, but it’s something I’ll never forget having thought was true about our world.