The majority of people have a deep dark secret that would be devastating for people to find out about. These stories will make you feel better about that secret.
All posts have been edited for clarity.
Cake Boss

“I run a cake business and I charge people hundreds for wedding cakes. Every last one is made using Pilsbury cake mix I buy for one dollar a box at Walmart. I suck at baking. Every time I have ever tried to make a cake from scratch it sucked. But baking is like, my whole deal. My friends all call me the cake girl. It’s like my whole life is a lie.
People compliment my cakes all the time and tell me how delicious they are. They tell me it’s so much better than box mix cake and they could never bake a cake so delicious.
Well, guess what. For one dollar, they too could make a cake just as delicious. Just add oil, eggs, and water.
In my defense, I love cake decorating. I make all of the frostings and fondant from scratch. I just hate baking cakes. I base my prices mostly on the decoration of the cakes and not on the cake itself.
Still, no one knows about this except my husband. Even my best friends think I slave over the oven mixing and baking the cakes. I have been doing it for years. If anyone knew my business and reputation would be in the toilet for sure. I keep telling myself I have to learn how to make the cakes without the box mixes, but I never do it. I feel like such a sham sometimes.”
Fake It Til You Make It

1. “I faked the last two years of my college education. My parents put so much pressure on me to the point that I suffered from severe depression and anxiety. I couldn’t handle it so I faked it all. I lied to everyone and made up fake transcripts.
I just got my foot in the door in my desired field thanks to a friend as they hired me as a subordinate. The place only hired college graduates but no one double checked my credentials since I was recommended.
My hope is that if I need to find another job I’ll have been at the place long enough to get it by experience alone because I work for a prestigious company. I’m not bad at my job. I’m actually quite good. But my fear is eventually I’ll hit a wall and the lie will come to light.
No one has known this for the better part of a decade. It’s a relief to finally say it ‘out loud.’ I can’t even tell those I love. My silence is my prison.”
2. “I am basically living a lie. I told my entire family I was able to transfer out of community college and into a university, but I never finished up the requirements. So since I live at home, every day instead of going to school I go to the local library.
My lies are so extensive, I even go to the campus and meet my girlfriend for lunch sometimes.
I’ve made fake transcripts to show my family, and to make it look like I’m actually studying I go to MIT OpenCourseWare to look up facts that I ‘learned in class’ that day.
I have become a remarkable liar. I hope to be transferring in the fall and then I look forward to living a normal life. Coming clean is not an option at this point.”
Anything for Love

1. “There was a girl who I had a crush on the moment I saw her on my college campus. She ended up dating a complete tool a few weeks later.
I happened to end up sitting in a study room with him and a few mutual friends.
He talked about how he didn’t think she was that attractive and how he liked other girls.
I wrote the girl an anonymous email using one of those websites telling her about the things I heard and how the guy was a prick.
She ended up breaking up with him after she found out he was cheating.
I’m happy to say that we are still together seven and a half years later.
She still has no idea.
We’re living together in a big city and there’s probably a proposal in the cards sometime soon. You never know where a simple email may take you.”
2. “I once helped out my female friend’s family by taking care of their cat for a week. Every day for a week, I would go over there and snoop around their house.
I found my friend’s diary and proceeded to read the entire thing.
I used the information to get her to like me, and she is currently my wife.”
3. “After graduating from high school, I went to a small out-of-state college where no one from high school knew me. I was told many times how impressive my false Australian accent was, so I decided it would be great fun to go through college pretending to be from Australia.
All of my friends and even my girlfriend of two years think I’m Australian. I have a completely fake Australian identity, family, and past.
I will soon be graduating, and I plan on asking the girl to marry me. Everything she knows about me is Australian I don’t know how to tell her she doesn’t really know me.
Guess I’m forever a bloke.”
4. “My boyfriend and I met at the brothel where I used to work.”
IT Guy

1. “I work in IT and it’s amazing what people will do on their computers and say in their emails despite having to sign a waiver that all computer activity at work is monitored and recorded.
I have half the company’s banking, social media, and personal email account info and passwords. I know who is secretly banging who at the office behind their spouse’s backs. I know who is cybering at work and jerking it in the bathroom almost daily. At least they tell their chat partner they’re running off to the bathroom. I know when people are having marital problems, financial problems, I even know one person here had their children taken away because a social worker found illicit substances in their house. I know who is embezzling money, I know when people get fired for completely made-up reasons like they just want to replace them with someone younger and nicer on the eyes, and I know who my boss is buying illicit substances from.
Basically, I have a treasure trove of my coworker’s secrets. I won’t actively do anything with this info, but it’s nice knowing I have the ammunition there if something were to ever happen.”
2. “For a time, another IT guy and I were watching the email system and tracking a couple of coworkers who were hooking up on the side. It was all through the company email system.
The guy was married with kids, the girl was engaged to someone else. This went on for a year and a half. She would send him dirty pictures and would email each other to schedule after-hours hookups all the time.
His wife found out, she told him she wanted a divorce. Somehow they remained married.
The girl would gripe to her friend how she was so in love with the married guy but she knew that the engaged guy was the better choice. It went on for another several months then she quit.
I still work with the married guy, and he’s still married to the same woman. It’s odd knowing all of this stuff about people.
I also don’t look at people’s emails anymore, it got boring. All I can say to everyone though, don’t send personal stuff through the company email system.”
Blind Brother

“I have a blind brother. When we were young, I used to get so frustrated at all the extra attention he received and how I had to be more responsible with my sibling than my peers. So, when my brother and I would go play, go to the store, or just generally go anywhere without adults, I would abandon him somewhere unfamiliar to him. Then, I would stand off quietly and watch the anxiety set in as he tried to figure out where he was and what was going on.
Also, I was really intelligent as a child and knew that was my ticket to attention. When I would ‘help’ my brother with his homework, I would teach him all the wrong answers, so that I could continue being the smarter sibling.
Today, my brother is my best friend. He goes to college and lives by himself. He’s become one of the most intelligent men I’ve ever met. I’m trying to make it up to him now by being the best big sister ever, but I still feel so guilty at how I found him to be a burden when I was a kid.”
“Chronic Back Pain”

“I faked having a chronic pain condition for five and a half years in order to not have to attend middle school and high school. I was placed on a homebound program and allowed to study at my own pace from home. I was able to fool a team of medical professionals, my family, my teachers, and my friends into believing that my symptoms were real.
Also, I racked up over a hundred thousand dollars in medical bills for my family. That’s just what the insurance didn’t cover during those five and a half years. I did not realize the extent of the medical bills until late into my lie and it was one of the main reasons I decided enough was enough.
Upon graduating from high school and getting accepted into a good university, I decided that it was time for my ‘pain’ to go away.
No one has questioned the fact that my symptoms vanished overnight, my medical team attributed it to the fact that I was nearing the end of puberty.
What I did was a horrible thing, and my family is continuing to drown in debt from medical bills. I plan to pay them back someday. I simply started the hoax because I was a twelve-year-old who absolutely loathed middle school. I attempted to end the lie at the beginning of every school year but eventually fell back into saying my ‘pain’ prevented me from attending school.
Today I feel horrible about what I did, and I desperately want to tell everyone that it was a lie, but I know that I cannot because I will never gain credibility back again.”
Young Entrepreneur

“Back in the mid to late 1990s I had a roommate that was from Amsterdam and we were really into smoking good bud so one year we decided to take a trip there. While we were there I met a lot of his relatives and friends. Some of the people were outright criminals which was pretty common in the Netherlands. Several of his close friends were dealers that sold a variety of items. One night we felt like rolling so one of his friends came over with two huge bags full of pills and told us to grab a handful. So we took a bunch that night and had plenty left over to take back home with us.
Several friends back home offered to buy what we had left so we got rid of them. Fast forward a few months and my roommate decided to go back home to Amsterdam for a holiday and I went with him. We saw the same guy again and I told him that we took some pills back with us and everyone loved them and kept asking if they could get more.
He replied, ‘You know, we can get some there if you know people who want them.’
Being the entrepreneur I am, we struck a deal and he gave us some pills to take back.
We made it back with no problems and the pills were gone in no time. His friend was impressed at how quick they went so they wanted to send more. We came up with ideas on how to get them back cost-effectively and safely. We had some success with mailing them mixed in with large boxes of candy but because we kept having to increase the number of shipments and number of pills in each shipment they eventually started getting busted so we switched methods a few times and finally realized the most effective, and cheapest, way to do it was to have mules fly them in the country. These mules were professionals and would stuff the pills in plastic bags, dip them in a solution, and swallow them for the plane ride only to drink some solution upon arrival to a hotel to pass them in a bucket. Another method involved getting a tailor to sew pills in a vest that was worn underneath a coat. This method worked quite well and was very cost-efficient. One mule could carry about eight thousand pills but it was riskier due to the random pat-downs.
Business was good. We were making a ton of cash and it was actually harder to get the cash out of the country than getting the pills here. I was really low-key about letting anyone know what we were doing but my roommate loved to show off which started causing problems between us. He was getting really messed up almost every night and it was causing a severe lack of judgment on his part. He loved the attention and eventually started hanging out with another crowd of people. One of the guys, who had just gotten out of jail a few months before, got a call from some dude he knew who wanted a rather large quantity.
He went to meet the guy and it was a setup. So he got busted along with all of our supply and it was going to be a few weeks before we got anything else so my roommate, in his delusional state, decided to fly back to Amsterdam to get bring some back himself. He actually was so strung out at this point he decided to just duct tape a bag full to his inner thigh and fly back. If that weren’t enough he thought it was a good idea to take a couple of pills for the flight and needless to say he got busted.
His friends back in Amsterdam were not too happy about the situation. They contacted me and said his desire to be a big shot was putting the whole thing in jeopardy and wanted me to take over things. So we decided while he was in jail awaiting a court hearing for a bond that I would take over but they would keep sending him a small amount to keep him satisfied but he wasn’t to know that I was carrying on the business. I had a few friends in different cities that I trusted so we expanded and the business just kept getting bigger and bigger. Eventually, I contacted another friend who had been living in another country partying for a few years. He happened to be very good friends with some guy whose dad was a major trafficker. He said everything was set up and as long as the quality was good they would jump at the opportunity because the pills were hard to come by there.
So we set up a meeting and had a mule bring a vest full of pills there. While sitting with him at his buddy’s dad’s compound, it finally hit me how large it had become. I mean, I was at a huge compound, which had a private zoo, with dozens of armed guards with the son of one of the most powerful traffickers in the hemisphere and if everything went well I would have more money than I ever imagined possible in my entire life. It was like something out of a movie. They liked the pills and my friend’s buddy was going to talk to his dad the next day.
We didn’t hear from him the next day or the following day. We decided to go to a different city about two hours away and I went to his room to pick him up and found him there completely out of his mind. He had been up all night eating ridiculous amounts of pills and had been wandering around the hotel with no shirt on, sweating, and babbling to himself with a crazy look in his huge dilated eyes. The hotel staff was concerned and I had to get him out of there before they called the police.
He was so messed up that when we checked out and was walking out of his room the bellhop just handed me a huge freezer bag full of pills and said, ‘You forgot these.’
Needless to say, he got the best tip of his life. I knew I couldn’t let the guys from Amsterdam see him like that so I checked him into a different hotel, took the pills with me, and came up with an excuse as to why we couldn’t leave that day. Meanwhile, my roommate somehow got wind of the fact that we were all out of the country working on some deal and he was left in the dark. Of course, he was beyond furious. All of that started stressing me out but what I didn’t realize was the real fun hadn’t even begun.
The following day, my friend had finally started to get back to a normal frame of mind and we went to catch a bus, with the pills on us. Just after we bought our tickets, we rounded the corner to get on the bus and saw military police. They were searching everyone as they boarded the bus.
My friend and his girlfriend both said something to the effect of, ‘Something isn’t right, this never happens,’ at the same time.
We were in a line and if we turned around and walked out it would look suspicious. So I whispered to my friend to just follow my lead and act like he was taking care of me. So I bent over and shoved my finger down my throat and made myself puke and make a loud violent noise so everyone could see I was sick. I immediately turned around and acted like I was about to throw up again and ran back into the bus station holding my hand over my mouth like I was going to the bathroom, but instead jumped in the closest taxi and hauled it out of there. We took the most expensive taxi ride of my life to the city that was two hours away all the while discussing how messed up that situation was and how odd it was for the military to be there searching everyone. It was like they knew something.
Anyway, so we get to the town and track down one of the trafficker’s cousins who told us that my friend’s buddy went to talk to his dad about the opportunity. His dad flipped out and did not want him involved in that line of business. He told us to watch our back because his dad wanted to see us. His dad was a very, very powerful guy and not someone you wanted to upset unless you had a death wish. So his dad sent him away somewhere and we had no way whatsoever to contact him. We knew his dad was tied in with the police and factions of the military so we concluded that the incident at the bus station was the work of his dad so then we were afraid for our lives. Plus we were stuck with thousands upon thousands of pills and had no clue what to do. So we hid out and laid low for a couple of days to try to sell the pills to someone else. We couldn’t get anything to pan out and it felt like some of the people were just trying to rob us, while others may have connections with the dad and we didn’t want him to find us. I got more paranoid with every passing minute and we switched hotels daily with the quality of the place getting worse and worse until we finally ended up literally staying in a ‘fun’ house and every time I heard a women scream I immediately thought someone had found us.
So I started feeling sick one afternoon and so did everyone else. I was so paranoid at that point I thought we were all poisoned. So I gathered enough strength to get out of bed, tell my friend and the guys from Amsterdam I needed to get to a doctor, grabbed my bag, and took a taxi to the nearest airport. I took the first flight back home, went see a doctor the next day, it ended up I had a bad case of food poisoning, and never spoke to any of those guys again.
I finished college and am now a successful business professional. I’m amazed at the lessons that period in my life taught me and how often those lessons come in handy in the business world. In retrospect, it was good that it ended the way it did because I would have surely ended up in jail or dead had I continued that lifestyle. Thankfully I never went to jail or was even questioned so there is nothing on my record. My roommate was not so lucky and I read a news article where he served three years in federal prison. I’ve never told this story to anyone, and even if I did they would never believe me.”
Psycho Birth Mother

“Everyone around me already knows that I was brought up by foster families because I had a rough early childhood. I deliberately keep it vague and say stuff like, ‘I’d rather not go into it,’ so that people will just assume I was abused in some way and they’ll stop asking about it.
The truth is that for the first seven years of my life, I was brought up as a girl by my psycho birth mother who really wanted a daughter and didn’t let the snag of giving birth to a boy stop her from trying to raise one.
She was a pretty successful professional in the legal field and had me via an anonymous sperm donor from a fertility clinic. She found out I was a boy at a late ultrasound and then moved across the country. She gave birth to me at home and continued to move about until I was five or so. It was just the two of us all my life, we had contact with other people, of course, but they rarely got very close. I had lots of friends but was always supervised.
I found out way after that my mother’s strong religious beliefs were a lie she used to explain why she was so strict about me being ‘private’ and never letting anyone see me get changed or anything. I just accepted all of it as fact because I had never been told anything different.
I was sent to a religious school for girls and had a really great childhood. I was a bit of a tomboy and played with lego and toy animals, rather than dolls and stuff, but that’s not unusual and no one ever questioned I was a girl, even me. I knew about men and women but had never really seen many undressed people. My mother never ever spoke to me about it, but I kinda had the impression that when I grew up my johnson would fall off. I don’t know, to be honest, I never really thought about it that much.
Anyway, I carried on with my happy girlhood and had a bunch of friends and everything was great until I was seven and a teacher accidentally spilled a cup of hot coffee over me at school. The liquid soaked through my clothes and was scalding me so the staff immediately stripped me out of my dress and underwear to get the hot coffee away from my skin. And then they found out.
The cops were called and I was taken to speak with Social Services. They asked me a bunch of questions about life at home and stuff. Meanwhile, my mother was taken in for questioning too. She refused to acknowledge me as male and insisted I was her daughter. Because she was completely delusional, I wasn’t allowed to go back home and got put with a foster family, and went through loads of therapy.
The worst part was that literally overnight, I lost everything. My mother, my home, all my toys, all my clothes, I moved schools so I lost all my friends, they cut all my hair off and told me I wasn’t a girl anymore. It was really traumatic.
The first foster home wasn’t that great. They had three boys already and going from a sheltered ‘religious’ only-child upbringing to a rough-and-tumble testosterone-filled environment was really difficult. They tried to force me to be masculine and I was just too confused about what they wanted. Anything ‘girly’ was reprimanded and I felt so lost and alone because nothing I did was right.
I tried to commit suicide when I was eleven and again at thirteen because I didn’t feel I fit in anywhere. After the second attempt, they moved me to a different foster family who was awesome. I consider them to be my parents because they were the first people who actually stood up for me. The first thing was that they let me grow my hair. From the moment I got taken into care, they buzzed my hair short, and I hated it. They always had to hold me down and do it forcibly while I was crying and fighting. My new parents flatly refused to do it and said that loads of boys had long hair. They also let me quit karate and football and take up swimming and jazz dance. Since I’d been in care, no one had ever stood up for my right to choose what activities to do, or how to dress before. It was amazing.
In the end, I came out of it with a pretty healthy gender identity. I’m a guy, not the most butch guy ever, but I’m fine with that. I went through school and got my degree and have a pretty good job and an amazing, supportive wife. Everything looks great but I can never speak about my early childhood, and how I grew up as a little girl.”
Grand Theft Steam Roller

“Back in middle school a friend in our building and I were standing outside our street. It was being repaved and we noticed the workers all left for lunch.
My friend said, ‘Hey let’s go sit in the steam roller,’ and being young and dumb we did.
When we got to the steam roller we realized the keys were still in it.
My friend said, ‘Hey let’s drive it.’
He started it up we started going down the street. He drove and I just rode along but the next thing I knew we were losing control. We didn’t realize that steam rollers turn from the back, not the front.
We crashed into some old guy’s living room while he was sitting there watching tv.
All we could do was just run so we booked it and left.
I told my parents I was over at a friend’s house and we didn’t come back to our neighborhood until later that day. We came back to find the cops had been going house to house looking for us.
My parents suspected nothing and asked the cops what stupid kid would do that.
The old man whose house we crashed into only got a basic description of my friend but not me.
There were wanted posters with a twenty thousand dollar reward for my friend but the picture looked nothing like him.
After about three months, the posters went away and we were never caught. We never told anyone.”
Orange Juice

“When my half-sister was growing up she hated her stepdad, my real dad. I think he is a great guy although he is a little crazy. They get along fine now, he was just weird and a little mean to my mom’s other kids.
He was a man of routine and every morning he would get up, get the paper, make freshly squeezed orange juice for himself, my mom, and me but not my half-sister. Then he would go get ready for work before coming back to eat breakfast and drink his orange juice.
My sister used to pine for a glass of that orange juice and got her revenge in quite trivial ways. She would get to the shower before him, take a long time and make him late.
She would leave messages in the window that said, ‘I loath you,’ and such.
She then stepped it up, waited for him to finish making the orange juice, and go to the bathroom. She then snuck out, drank half his glass, savored every drop, and filled the rest of the glass up with her urine, set it in place, and waited. She then sat and watched him slurp down every last drop in complete satisfaction.
She said nothing mean that he did really bothered her after that. She would just smile and think, you drank my urine and you loved it.
After that their relationship actually got better as they weren’t bickering anymore. They actually have a great relationship now.
She asked when she can tell him.
I said only on his deathbed. So we have that to look forward to, which is nice.”