What childhood illusions have you had shattered as you were growing up?

I was very fortunate that I was born to an erudite family. There are many such children’s in Nepal who do not get proper parental care and love. Many of the parents are such that they cannot give full time to their children so in turn the children feel they are isolated and they start protesting concerned with self-protection and take the help of violence to fulfil their needs. They think that we can get our needs fulfilled from the demands and the illusions start developing in their mind. Such childish illusions are general among many of us. Their view may be distorted but it is pragmatic.
My first illusion in life was that god was the central power of the world and no matter what we get in our life was because of the god’s wish. One who prays a lot to god gets everything and the one who ignores remains barehanded. I remember my physics test when I was in junior high school at 8th standard. Every time before the exam I used to pray the god for getting simple questions in test. Coincidently all the other subjects were easy and I got better grades on them. But in case of my physics test I prayed god for getting an A*. My every longing was being fulfilled so my gluttony made me lazy and I deserted physics thinking that I shall easily get good grade. But the result was just opposite. I got E on my transcript and that was the most startling moment in my life. I got the lowest grade I had ever got. I realised that whatever we get in our life, it is just because of our hard work and determination. Lazy ones are always going to lose.
Correspondingly I always had a belief that death is a pre-defined process. If one dies co-incidentally I used to take it as natural. My quote used to be “his time of death had come so he died!” It was pertinent in every case almost. Even during September 11 incident when I knew about the loss of thousands of lives, I reacted normally with the same feeling that I used to apply as always. I used to think that a person dies because of his bad deeds. But after the Tsunami in Indian Ocean and in many areas of the Asia, when many naive lost their life I finally realised that death don’t occur in a pre-defined manner. If a problem occurs we can even lose our life within seconds even though we are free from bad deeds and diseases. This incident became the cause of my change in approach.
Life is a complete cycle so we get through different aspects of it. From our childhood to the old age we do have different types of illusions embedded inside us which though seems crazy to the outer world but is very important for us as we can gain something new from them.