I was brought up in a sheltered environment. Since I was very young, my parents did not let me do many things, such as jumping around, or climbing trees, fearing of scraping of skin or breaking bones. Therefore, P.E. classes were my biggest fear. I hated climbing rope, high jump, or even plain old running.
Intellectually, for some very odd reason, I also grew up as a person with low self esteem, and it took me until the recent years to shake it off. There could be many reasons why I had such a low self esteem, and many of them point to being a Chinese girl growing up in China. My parents just didn't want to let anything (harmful) happen to me.
It also took me a while to stop blaming the society or my parents for my 'weaknesses', and focus on growing out of my own shadows. By the way, I strongly encourage anyone over 30 to start doing so, and taking responsibility to oneself.
Obviously there were many things that were told to me, which were wrong, but I erroneously absorbed them like a sponge. I would call them "myths". Luckily, in college, I took this class called: "critical thinking", which I enjoyed very much, even though I took it as credit/non credit, because of heavy computer science course work. Let's apply "critical thinking" to the following myths I have heard since childhood, and discuss briefly why they were merely myths, nevertheless they could bring adverse impact to someone's upbringing and adult life.
First and foremost, and this I still hear today among my relatives. "Girls are not good with math, physics and science." Many years ago, when I heard my cousin said that to my girl cousin, I protested furiously, "you should never say such things to a girl! Girls can do math and physics as well as boys." I heard the same from my own physics teacher in middle school. Back then I believed him, so I didn't try at all to learn the course, because, "obviously I'm not good at it." Luckily, when I came to the U.S., I sort of had a second chance to try things I normally didn't dare when I was in China. I found math and physics easy to understand when I studied them in college, which encouraged me to learn other challenging subjects.
As far as my lacking physical abilities. It was changed since I started hanging out with Jack. He got me to go snowboarding, kiteboarding and scuba diving. None of which I would have done on my own. Back in college, my physical exercises were limited to jogging, aerobics classes, and the occasion Tai Chi. If it weren't for the purpose of weight lost, I would have been a perfect book worm, aka, nerd.
My conclusion and lessons learned? Fear factors, however they were ingested into us, create mental blocks. Apply critical thinking to everything in life. Question everything you heard and check the sources. Don't let your fear impair and limit you. Go out of your comfort zone once a while or you will never know what you'll find. If you ended up not liking what you found, then move on. For example, I now find out I'm afraid of heights, and am still unable to do Yoga inversion poses because of fear.
So like Dory said in the animation, Finding Nemo, "Well, you can't never let anything happen to him (Nemo). Then nothing would ever happen to him. Not much fun for little Harpo." I also like this quote I heard somewhere: "People say 'you can't do it' just because they can't do it themselves."
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