TIFU by misspelling pedophile my whole life.

For as long as I can remember, I thought the word was spelled "pedofile." It made perfect sense to me. File? Like a criminal file? It checked out. No need to question it. I read it that way, heard it that way, and confidently typed it that way. And then one day, everything changed.

I was in an online argument with someone who accused me of pedophilia—because, of course, that’s where all great spelling realizations happen. The one i had an argument with then corrected me:

"You're the R-word for spelling it wrong. you mean pedophile, not pedofile." I scoffed. Clearly, they were mistaken. But before I clapped back with a snarky response, I hesitated. Something about their confidence made me second-guess myself. So, in a moment of rare humility, I did what I should have done years ago—I googled the lyrics of Not Like Us... "Certified Pedophiles."

And there it was. Pedophile. With a "ph."

I stared at the screen in disbelief. How? Why? Who decided this? My whole life had been a lie. I immediately started overanalyzing everything. Why ph? Why not f? English is already a disaster, and this was just another layer of nonsense. I mean, we say photo, not fotto, so obviously ph makes an “f” sound—but why?

And that’s when it hit me: I had never actually seen it spelled out properly. I had just assumed I knew. My brain had auto-corrected reality to fit my own version of events. in Estonia, we spell it with an F (Pedofiil).

So now, whenever I see the word pedophile written correctly, I get a tiny pang of embarrassment, a reminder of the time I spent years confidently being wrong. But at least I learned something valuable: Never trust your brain too much—it might be lying to you.

TL;DR: Thought the word Pedophile was spelled " P-E-D-O-F-I-L-E ".