Decisions. Decisions. It doesn't matter how small or how extreme the decision is; ultimately it still affects your life in some way or another. It could be from choosing to help a friend out to picking up a venomous snake. Sometimes your life choices end with a good outcome. However that is not always the case. These people share the choice that impacted their life in a negative way. Content has been edited for clarity.
Discovery Channel Stunt Gone Wrong?
“I picked up a venomous snake, thinking I knew how to handle one from watching TV. Unfortunately, I got bitten on the wrist.
I held off getting help for like 10 minutes since I knew my parents would be really mad if I told them. I figured it was likely to be a ‘dry bite.’ I felt fine and mostly relieved until my arm started burning.
I was crying and screaming for help, so my parents drove me to the hospital. I started puking, feeling dizzy, and the rest was a blur. It took months before I regained the full use of my right hand, but some of the nerves are permanently damaged.”
Moments You Can’t Ever Get Back
“My fiancé and I decided to switch jobs one month into having our first child together. My job would be closer to family, better hours, and better pay. It was a no-brainer on my decision. It should be great, right?
It turned into the worst few months of my life. The management team was terrible. They were the type of management that was so bad that they make you feel worse by being there. Later on, I found out the reason there were two jobs available suddenly at this location. It turned out all the previous staff were leaving because of the horrible micromanaging.
I was so stressed it was making me hesitate to do tasks that I had been doing for nearly 10 years. The management team dropped my self-confidence so low that I began to think I was just terrible at my job. The final straw was when my boss tried to get me to erase records to make their numbers look better at the end of the month. This came up in an official regional meeting where my bosses’ boss also agreed that this was acceptable and I should be doing it. I was so taken aback that I never returned to work. I went on stress leave, spending the last few months trying to put the pieces back together.
It has been hectic for my fiancé and me. I feel like I have been missing out on the first year of my son’s life because I’ve had to deal with this happening. Things are getting better but I still fear for my job. I left my position but I still work for the same company. I just work in a different region so now I worry they will try and spread rumors or false claims about the whole thing to cover their butts.”
Rest In Peace
“I decided to work on a day I could have taken off.
Upon coming home, my dad had let my dog out (who he didn’t care about or watched at all), and my dog ended up getting hit by a car. He was hit about an hour after I left.
My dad let the one thing keeping me happy rot on the side of the road for about eight to nine hours. It was a very traumatic sight to come home to.
It has been almost a year and I still cry myself to sleep about it. As pitiful as it is to say, I’ve never been happy since. I’ve since adopted another dog, and he’s great, but he’ll never replace Tibby.
I miss you, buddy. I’m sorry I failed you by trusting you with somebody I should’ve cut out years ago.”
Family Secrets Revealed
“As a kid, I used my mother’s phone for WhatsApp purposes. I knew there were some tensions going on in my family between my mother and her youngest brother but I didn’t know too much. So I went snooping on her phone after talking to a friend and found some stuff that shocked the 14-year-old me. There were quite a few secrets on her phone. I finally got to know most of the situation.
I decided to confide to my second cousin a few months later with some secrets I found that day. It was an innocent attempt at gossip from my side but I should have just kept it quiet. My cousin later told his mom, who then spread the secrets everywhere and everyone.
By the time my mom found out, the damage was super duper done. I didn’t need to be punished because the guilt ate me up. I cried for days over what I had done. My mom and uncle had a fight about the slipped-out secrets.
My uncle, whom I was the closest to in my family after my mother, got rightfully mad at me. He decided to leave, blocking me on every platform. He hasn’t spoken to me in the last six years.
I still live with regret over what I had done to ruin the relationship despite my mom telling me that it was a childish mistake.”
“I Was Just Never One Of Them”
“I decided to join the military. I was treated like trash the whole time I was in. I worked my behind off, knowing exactly what I was doing but one guy decided that he didn’t like me. I was new while he had been there for a long time.
This wasn’t just your normal hazing, it was him making stuff up to demean my character and making sure every single person knew about it. He made sure no one would teach me my job (I was a mechanic). If someone tried to teach me something, he would interrupt and shut it down. Things got heated, but like I said he was there longer so no one wanted to challenge him to help out the new guy. It was the mob mentality and it was trash.
This set me up to be passed up for promotions and treated like a worthless worker. The rest of the time I was known for not knowing my job, that I wasn’t allowed to learn. I had to ask to be transferred to other shops just so I could do some work and learn how to do every other job in the division.
Eventually, I got out, honorably.
Since then, I don’t trust groups of people now. As I said, the mob mentality is a trash. And it feels weird meeting other veterans because they all have this ‘gung ho brotherhood’ vibe that I just never experienced. I was just never one of them. I’m also on disability now which makes life pretty hard for obvious reasons.
A whole career tanked because I didn’t wanna smoke spice with some dude on a Wednesday.”
Maybe He Was Too Adventurous
“Last year in June, I decided to hang off a Hoodoo, which is the native term for a large rock standing on top of a thinner base. It basically looks like the rock is balancing.
I had stood on it, and it seemed solid. I then had a great idea to hang off of it, and as soon as I put my weight on it, the rock gave way. I don’t remember the fall, but I woke up farther down the cliff, and my left hand was severely mangled. My family was there, so we could get help fast. My dad had to drive me to the nearest town with a hospital, which was about 40 minutes away. It was then another 45 minutes before I got any morphine to lessen the pain. I passed out after they gave it to me.
I woke up in an ambulance, going to a bigger city because I needed a plastic surgeon to reattach my fingers. It was on and off then, and I went into the surgery room. They told me that they couldn’t save my index finger, and they had to fuse two bones in my middle finger together because the knuckle was gone.
About 10 months after the accident, I am living with basically two and a half fingers and a thumb. It’s been challenging but since I’ve had no choice but to live with it, I’ve found the challenge fun. I have had no doubts in my mind that this should have killed me too. My dad, who had watched the fall before I disappeared, said I was folded over under the boulder. So how I survived, I have no idea.”
“I Lost A Lot Of Friends Because Of Her”
“In April of 2020, I met a girl named Alyx and we got close really fast. It also went down south really fast. It turned out she stalked, blackmailed, doxxed me for about 10 months. Every day, I got anonymous accounts spamming my direct messages with doxxed links, death threats, personal information, and other sensitive items.
It really made me feel like trash because the same thing was happening to my ex-girlfriend and my friends. They thought I was the one behind the anonymous accounts. I lost a lot of friends because of her.
The way I ‘coped’ with it was just telling myself everything was going to be okay, that everything WILL end at one point and there was nothing to be stressed about. But it’s still happening until today, but I try my best to calm myself down.”
“I Became Homeless And Had Nowhere Else To Go”
“In 2016, I started my current job. I worked with this weird dude who kind of popped up out of nowhere and wanted to be my friend. The back of my mind was telling me to not give him a chance, but I didn’t want to judge someone right off the bat like that so I chose to meet up with him for lunch one day when he asked. We had a lot in common and he seemed nice enough. We then became good friends. He wanted to date, but I was already in a long-term relationship and said no.
Later that year, I became homeless and had nowhere else to go (my boyfriend couldn’t help because of his lease and he lived really far away from my work). So without any other options, I chose to stay with that weird work friend. It was just supposed to be for a couple of weeks while I closed on a place.
Unfortunately, that didn’t work out. He immediately became a nightmare. He took my keys away, my phone and computer, and even read all my messages. He made sure I didn’t reach out to anyone about him stealing my money, breaking my stuff, and throwing things at me.
But his grand plan to force me to be with him was to obviously control me and to get me pregnant to trap me. He literally told me this to my face later on. So you could guess what he did. I ended up pregnant. When my boyfriend found out, he immediately abandoned me. I was stuck in that devil’s trap for six months until my mom and aunt came over one day to help me. He ended up beating my aunt up. The cops came and helped me escape.
I got into a place of my own right before I had the baby. Got therapy and struggled for a while. I had zero connection with my baby until he was five weeks old. I just felt nothing toward him.
But now I love him more than anything on earth. I don’t think too much about how he was created or who his father is at all. His father isn’t involved at all. As far as I know, nothing happened to him with the cops. But I did get him fired from the place we worked and he has been unemployed for more than two years.”
Too Much Drama
“I decided to sign up for Facebook. People had a reason to catch up back in the day. We didn’t see each other until the next time, so we had things to tell them about in the meantime. Now everyone knows everything everyone is doing daily. We put too much value on those things and then assign value to the people and what they do.
The consequence of getting Facebook was I got verified and became more well known through Twitter and other social media outlets. People have stalked me and created issues in my career for wrestling and media. It had been tough to deal with people trying to constantly take you down a notch with lies they spread around to everyone. Especially after certain celebrities made it okay to be a liar and get away with it.”
Happy Birthday?
“When I got married in my early 20s, I knew I didn’t want to. The problem was I still loved my ex-wife, but I clearly wasn’t in love with her. I think coming from a broken home I didn’t know how to tell between the two. My mom and stepdad screamed and fought all the time and the house was in chaos. I think because my ex-wife and I didn’t fight and it was calm, I associated that as ‘all’s good.’
When we got engaged, we had been together for five years (age 18 to 23) which when you’re that young, it feels like FOREVER. So I basically felt like ‘it was time.’
Our relationship was boring. We had no passion (it was a loveless marriage before we were even married), but she was basically ‘my person/best friend’ after coming into adulthood with each other. There was no glaring problem aside from the aforementioned ‘no passion,’ as we got along and we didn’t much fight or argue. We seemed to share the same morals/values.
Our problems seemed to fester almost immediately after we said, ‘I do.’
We both had fairly good jobs so the first thing we did was go buy a house we could barely afford, which was nice, except that it cost us almost all of our income just to maintain it. We had literally no extra money to have fun or travel.
I knew it wasn’t her fault, but I began resenting her that I was 24 years old and bored out of my mind. I spent my weekends going to early dinners, hanging out with my in-laws every weekend, and going to movies constantly because we couldn’t think of anything else to do. All the while, I watched my friends traveling, going to concerts, going to clubs, and hooking up. I was living vicariously through their fun and resenting my own life. I was 25 at this time, but felt 45.
Somehow, we dragged this miserable marriage out for four years. I got laid off from my job during the Great Recession in ‘08 when I was 28 years old and was unemployed for over a year. During that year, I sank deeper and deeper into depression and discovered MySpace, where I developed multiple online, emotional affairs with other women (never actually physically cheating or meeting anybody, I was too much of a chicken for that).
I continued to pull further and further away from my wife emotionally, and in hindsight, I was probably clinically depressed. I think I was subconsciously trying to goad my ex-wife to leave me, and for reasons, I could never understand she kept offering to try to work things out with me (such as going to counseling). I refused, and finally, she told me she wanted to separate.
It was scary, but almost a relief. I remember crying and being sad going through the process of packing up my belongings, but I eventually did and went and moved back home with my mom right before my 30th birthday.
After a couple of months of feeling sorry for myself, my mom basically told me to ‘Man Up’ and start doing something with my life, be it getting a job at McDonald’s or going back to school. I had my Associates’s Degree, so I opted to go back to college and finish my Bachelors’s Degree.
I immediately felt rejuvenated to have renewed purpose and direction in my life again, even though I was a 30-year-old college student at the university now. I felt like I finally got to live the fun I missed out on in my 20s. My curse of always looking way younger than my age paid off now, as I was 30 and finally looked legitimately like my early 20s. I was pretty physically fit and attractive so it was easy for me to pull chicks. I spent my early 30s now just playing the field with probably more game and success than I would have been able to pull off had I been single when I was younger.
Well, it was a fun few years but eventually, even the ridiculous 30-year-old Frat Boy act had to end, and not a moment too soon as I ended up meeting my current lovely wife.
I am now 41 years old, and seven years happily married too with two beautiful children.
Everything worked out in the end but I still regret that my 20s were wasted, and I do feel guilty for wasting my ex-wife’s time too. I was just too scared to hurt her by breaking up and pressed forward into a six-year marriage I never really wanted.”
“But I Didn’t Even Get A ‘Thank You'”
“My sister came to me about a friend who just had a cancer scare. I didn’t know her very well, but she was my sister’s best friend who has been there for her in very hard times. She wanted to get a car but wasn’t qualify for the loan without a cosigner.
Now I am poor, but I know how to game the credit score system, so my credit score was over 800 at the time. I agreed to help her friend for a few reasons. The first reason was I felt sympathy for the cancer scare. The second reason was that I trusted my sister. The third reason was that I had been there where I had money but horrible credit so I couldn’t get a decent card. And the final reason was that in six months, she was supposed to refinance and I’d be off the loan and that would put me closer to a perfect 850 credit. I was also to get a small chunk of money, so it was 25 percent self-serving and 75 percent to be nice.
Fast-forward to when I started to feel the deal was shady. I was up for over 24 hours and was unable to finish signing the documents. However, as an insomniac, I have a great memory when I’m completely dysfunctional at this long up. It was embarrassing to remember I barely could stand up and was dry heaving only because I hadn’t eaten anything. My chest was also hurting. Meanwhile, my sister and best friend were discussing that they would just forge my signature. At that point, I didn’t care because I was going to sign anyway. But I didn’t even get a ‘thank you’ from them.
The next day I was rightfully furious. I wanted to take my name off the loan and report it as fraud, but my sister asked me not to. She said it would have been more work to get rid of it than just waiting six months. I left it as an ace in the hole if her best friend didn’t pay.
My sister’s best friend then proceeded to lie to my sister and not pay. Long story short, the corrupt town’s chief was best friends with the dealership owner and he filed felony charges against me. Apparently in my state, just making a phone call to the police without pursuing the matter was considered a police report.
It cost me over 2,000 bucks to avoid going to prison for four years and I had to lie. There are not many instances in my life where I will lie. Not that I’m bad at it, but I just see little value in lying to people.
Afterward, I cut my sister out of my life and this went on for I believe over a year until we talked again. It turned out the friend royally betrayed her as well and she was agreeing to repay my legal fees. Now, this doesn’t sound like it is a particularly bad story, but it finally killed the part of me that wanted to help other people. I am a darker person now in life after this event, I’ll still help people, but never to that extent again.
I’ll donate blood and money to toys for tots, but that’s about it.”
“I Stood Too Close To The Speakers”
“I went to an extremely loud concert with no hearing protection and stood too close to the speakers. I had tinnitus for months. It went away for a little while then on and off. However, any loud noises from cars to beeping microwaves seem to trigger it 24/7, so I’m kind of just stuck with it forever now.
I can’t stand the ringing noises but I guess I cope with it by noise-masking. Unlike normal people, I can no longer just sit in a quiet room. I need white noise or music at ALL times, even to fall asleep. I even have a hard time reading and focusing on anything but I can get through it if I do breathing exercises and meditate. The moral of the story; don’t blow out your ears, and please wear hearing protection.”
She Never Got His Goodbye
“Back in 2015, my dad ended up in hospice. He was in terrible shape and everybody knew that he wasn’t going to last much longer. So one day, my older sister and I decided to go see him. There was something about seeing him in the state he was in that made me weak. I couldn’t be in that room. So I stood outside in the hall waiting for my sister. About an hour later we left. I didn’t tell him anything before we left. Didn’t even look at him.
A week later, he passed away. That day was my last time seeing him.
It’s been almost six years and I now feel as if I have a never-ending guilt cloud around me at all times.
I have dreams where he comes and all he does is ask ‘Why?’
It’s something I will never forgive myself for and I think I really mentally messed myself up because of it. All he wanted was to see me but it hurt me so much to see him just laying there.
The thought of him being gone doesn’t hurt half as much anymore. It’s just knowing how I spent our last moments. The more that time passes by, the more painful it gets.”
She Was Only Trying To Be Friendly
“When I was 14, I sat next to my cousin’s friend in the school bus. We talked on the ride to school. He was 18 and didn’t drive yet (not sure why). It was the only time we talked one-on-one. He had been to the house a few times before with my cousin, and he lived a couple of blocks away.
Shortly after that, he became my peeping tom. It took six months to figure out it was him. He would smack the outside wall, tap my window, and try to talk to me. He tried to impress me by smoking pipes and dope and singing to me.
I slept with my blinds closed, but my bed went right up to the window. The room was too small for the bed to fit anywhere else. My dad ended up putting wood over my window so he couldn’t see in. I would sneak out to my parent’s room while he did this, but he would run off before my dad could see him. All he ever saw was a guy running down the alley.
One night my brother stayed the night and sure enough, the guy showed up. My brother almost near caught him. He was able to give me a description. I confronted the guy the next day. He denied it, but it all stopped after that. We had called the cops various times, but each time we were told there was nothing they could do without proof.
As a result of all of that, I absolutely cannot sleep with my window or blinds open. I have blinds and blackout curtains over my bedroom windows. I also hate having my bed near my window. Oh, and I hate going outside alone a night. Never had an issue with it into that.”