Some things are best left unsaid. Unless you say them to the Internet, then they can definitely be said.
A Fateful Sunday Morning
“When I was 15, I tried to kill myself. My parents were out of town for the weekend, and on that Saturday night, I went into their medicine cabinet and took an ungodly amount of every pill in there (to this day I have no idea what I took), wrote out a long drawn suicide note, locked my door, and fell asleep on my bed.
Sunday morning, my parents came home much earlier than I expected. I had left a small desk lamp on in my room, and when my parents got home, they tried to get into my room to turn off the light. I was obviously unresponsive, and my parents freaked out so much that my dad broke down the door to my room. My dad shook me awake asking me a million questions angrily, like why was the door locked, why I wasn’t responding and what was wrong with me. I groggily lied and told them I was super tired and didn’t feel good. They hesitantly believed me and left my room.
When they left, I grabbed the note and destroyed it. Went out into the living room and cried on my mom’s shoulder for what felt like hours. When she asked me what was wrong I just told her I had a really bad weekend and nothing else. To this day my parents joke about how I sleep like the dead, not knowing how close I was to actual death. I have never told my parents what happened that weekend, or how they unknowingly saved my life. To this day I still own that little desk lamp that I left on that night and turn it on whenever I’m feeling depressed as a reminder that all you need is a little light to get you through the darkest of times. This was 16 years ago next month.”
A Secret You (Literally) Can’t Hide
“My ex-girlfriend gave me herpes and lied to me about it the entire time. Crazy thing is, not even she knows I contracted it. I ‘accused’ her of having herpes towards the end of our relationship, and it resulted in a whole physical assault on me…punching, choking, shirt ripping, etc. She was a peach!
Our relationship was almost over by the time I realized what she had done, so I never wanted to admit it to her…I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing.
Here I am years later, and I still can’t bring myself to date anyone. I don’t even know how to admit to it, how to bring it up, when to bring it up, etc. Obviously, it’s not something I’m going to hide from a potential partner, so I’ve just grown to accept my ‘forever-single’ fate. My friends and family always ask about my dating life and why I’m still single. They just think my ex-girlfriend messed up my head really bad and that I’m now some sort of woman-hater. If they only knew.”
The Worst Vacation Ever
“When I lived in another city by myself, a customer at the butcher shop I worked at became friends with me, trying to help me get a better job with my degree. I was around 23 or 24 at the time. He was probably in his early 50s and had a wife and kids, very wealthy, and so I met with him over lunch/coffee once or twice for his advice.
He asked if I was interested in accompanying him to Montreal, to get a chance to visit the city, as he was going there on a business trip. Being the naive idiot I was, I thought that sounded cool, and I’d been wanting to visit Montreal for years.
We get there and he takes me to this weird massage place where they let him use a room. He basically gave me a very intimate massage that I never wanted while I laid there rigid the entire time, wanting it to be over but not knowing what to do. I never implied to him that I wanted a romantic relationship. I was confused and scared and I didn’t want him touching me, but I was alone in the city with this guy because I was an idiot.
We shared a hotel room with one bed that night. I ended up getting horrible stomach pains and told him I felt sick, meanwhile all night he was trying to touch me, run his hands over me, and I was telling him, ‘Please don’t touch me, I feel sick.’
Then we drove back the next day, and I tried to sleep the 6-hour car ride until he finally dropped me off at my apartment. During the car ride, he had a phone conversation with his wife like nothing was happening. I felt disgusting.
I never spoke to him or saw him again. And I’ve been ashamed that I let this happen to me by being so stupid ever since.”
More Than Just A Bully
“My brother was always…off. I genuinely think he is a sociopath. He was a bully when we were kids. He would put tacks on the ground and call our baby niece over to him. He hung me from the balcony. I nearly died. If my uncle hadn’t found me, I wouldn’t be here. That’s just what my family openly knows. What they don’t know is that he physically abused me from a young age. He’d push me down the stairs leading to the basement garage in our apartment complex, laughing the whole time. He lured me into the woods once to show me something. He had tied a cat to a tree in the woods. Its legs were bent at odd angles. They were broken. But it was alive. It tried to get away from him. He just smiled. It started screaming, and I turned and ran. It went silent before I got out of there.
Later, my mother asked me if I wanted my brother to be sent away to live somewhere else (after all that other stuff happened). One of the last incidents was my brother locking himself in the bathroom with my niece. My sister lost it. My niece was too scared to say what happened in there. And eventually, she forgot. My brother said nothing happened, but my niece was bawling. She wouldn’t go in there with him willingly. Not after the tack thing. Still don’t know what happened in there. Anyways, I told my mom to send him away but didn’t explain further (she knew of things that happened in the home, but not out of it). So, my brother was sent away to a group home. He visited a couple times after he was sent away. The last time I saw him, he pulled a knife out on me. At first just to show it off. Then he started talking about blood. I told my mother and he wasn’t allowed to visit anymore.
He started calling while I was in college, asking for money and other things. He had been in and out of prison after the group home and after one jail stint, he wanted to live with me. He told me he was on the offender registry, so I’d have to disclose that to my landlords. I told him ok when I really didn’t because I was scared. Luckily he was locked up within a month of his release. I’m glad he is back there. I’m still dealing with a lot of issues he instilled inside of me.”
A Pair Of Precocious Prepubescents
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“I technically lost my innocence at age 8.
I was forced to go to some adults party thing at our church and, other than this girl who was also my age named Shannon, I was the only kid there. Shannon and I were extremely bored and kept to ourselves at first before gravitating toward one another out of boredom. Boredom led to us exploring the church, where we found a classroom that was supposed to be locked like all of the others, but it wasn’t. So we went in and hung out, and locked the door behind us so that it was ‘our room.’ She suggested we play ‘house,’ so we built a fort out of all of the tables and chairs and let our imaginations run wild as we pretended to be married and living in this ‘house’ (our fort). We mimicked eating dinner and watching tv and everything else, and then eventually she said, ‘Well, if we’re married, we need to do it.’ Despite our age, we weren’t idiots, and we had both seen movies, so we knew exactly what that meant, and we both got naked. We embraced and kissed and even said, ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too’ because that’s what we thought adults did.
When you’re 8, you can get hard, but it’s not the same as being post-pubescent and an adult when you get a hard-on. There’s nothing pleasurable about it really, it just gets hard. Mine was hard, and we both knew what to do, so I laid down on the floor and she squatted over me and put me inside her. We grinded back and forth a few times (because we didn’t really know what else to do other than that) and then she slid me out of her and stood up and said, still pretending we were a married couple playing house, ‘Ok, goodnight now,’ and then laid down next to me and hugged me and pretended to go to sleep. After a few minutes, we got up and got dressed and resumed playing house further, which was basically just re-enacting everything we’d already done like pretending to eat dinner, talk about our made up days, etc.
It wasn’t until years later that I realized that I’d technically lost my innocence that night (no climax because I couldn’t due to being so young, but still) and then never told anyone because it would’ve been so hard to explain plus someone most likely would’ve seen the whole thing as some sort of abuse, either on her part or my part, even though both of us were just kids.
Sidenote: I popped my actual cherry (this time with full climax) just 8 years later at 16 – also at a church function. I went to a different church at that point and had a girlfriend that didn’t go to church and one night, while swimming as a youth group at a friend’s house at their pond, she started jerking me off in the water and we swam over to underneath their pier where we full on did it in the water while the rest of our friends splashed around and swam nearby. Turns out they all knew, they just didn’t know how to react at the time because it was a church thing and we were ‘sinning right next to them.'”
Thanks, Dad
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“My dad was not a good parent and extremely lazy. When I would wake up in the middle of the night and ask to go pee, he would just put me back in bed and tell me to go back to sleep. It got so ingrained in me to sleep through that internal alarm that tells you to get up and pee that even now in my 20s, the only reason I don’t wet the bed is I’ve learned to not drink anything an hour or more before bed and to force myself to use the washroom right before I go to sleep. I wake up painfully dehydrated every day, but it’s better than being an adult that wets the bed.
My father has doomed me to a lifetime of the most embarrassing and awkward struggle.”
A Special Pair Of Jeans
“When I was in high school (freshman year), I was sort of the nerdy, geeky brainiac. I was well known because I grew up in the area, but not really popular or social. A new guy moved into town, and one day when I was walking down the street, he came up and started talking to me. Thought he was pretty cool and I did not have many male friends so I tried to be cool and such.
Well anyways we started hanging out, and he taught me how to ride motorcycles. We spent all summer just riding and hanging out in the local desert. I was always impressed that he could just whip his junk out and urinate anywhere because I wouldn’t let anyone see mine. I was raised in California, and in school, we had to take showers in gym class, but I noticed right away that I seemed to be the only uncircumcised guy in the entire school, so I did everything I could to not take showers.
Well, he ended up being the stud of the school and played a bunch of sports—I did not. He was still my friend though, and it was great. He also had two older brothers and he would ask me to spend the night sometimes. In the mornings, he and his brothers would wrestle in their boxers and their junk would always flop out of their boxers; I was just in awe that they were so confident.
Well anyway, I guess I sorta got a major man crush on my friend and would sometimes pop wood when I saw him. I knew I liked girls, but there was something about him. One time when I saw his entire family leave the house, I knew I could go into his garage and get into his house. I noticed the fresh laundry was out on a table, and I took a pair of his boxers and a pair of his 501 jeans. I got home, got in my room and put them on and beat off wearing them. I kept them for many years and kept doing it. I am 57 years old now, and I still think about him. I still can’t put on 501 jeans without getting hard. He ended up being a very Christian dad with several children, and if he ever knew, he would be so disgusted.”
Getting A Little Too Friendly With Family
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“There was an opportunity I had exactly once, wherein if given the chance, I absolutely would have shagged my cousin.
It was at a family reunion. She was a cousin of similar age whom I was only related to by marriage and whom I’d met only a couple of times before. Tall, pale skin, dark hair, thick in the right places….right up my alley. There was immediate tension between us; I felt it clear and familiar, but despite how attracted to her I was, I remained as neutral as possible in interaction and demeanor towards her.
I did not count on her being so friendly with me though.
She invited me to hang out with her, just the two of us, and watch a movie together. So we talked and whatnot, got to know each other a little and moved into the TV room to watch the movie together on the couch while the family was elsewhere. We got closer and closer on that couch, watching ‘Dirty Rotten Scoundrels’ on DVD, enjoying the movie but also with the thought in my head that I fully intend to see where this relationship between us can go.
Unfortunately, or perhaps, fortunately, depending on who you ask, we were interrupted. We thought we had some time alone, but family came trickling into the room, then it was time for family activities, and our plan to hang out was stymied. The disappointment on her face was as obvious as it could be, and it hit me pretty hard. Now I look back on that day and wonder what could have been. I totally would have hooked up with her if things went that way.”
A Cacophony Of Good Advice
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“I hear voices in my head.
The reason why I haven’t gotten rid of them is that they keep me ‘sane.’ I was suicidal at one point when they first started talking to me. They talked me down like any normal person.
So now I hear them, constantly telling me they love me and to keep moving on. They encourage me to get help, to talk to people, to not let myself fall back into the depression. I know I’m insane but I was so much worse without them.
So far, three years later, all good. 10 voices, all different personalities but all very comforting.”
Talk About Type-A
“I’ve got my funeral pre-paid for, and am currently in the process of finalizing my will.
I adopted a minimalist lifestyle so that it wouldn’t be very obvious when I started getting rid of my stuff. I even adopted minimalist eating habits so that any foodstuffs left behind are likely to be nonperishable.
Basically, I’m setting my affairs in order so that when I die, the only things that’ll remain of me are memories and a teddy bear. I don’t want to inconvenience anyone. While I don’t consider myself suicidal, I spend a lot of time working on ‘the plan’ to make certain that my death won’t cause any real difficulty for anyone in my life.
That same desire to ease my passing is also what keeps me from suicidal thoughts – the idea that any positive impact I’ve had during my life would be negated by an untimely end. I haven’t told anyone as I just figure most people assume I’m joking when I tell them I spend a lot of time pondering my inevitable demise.”
A Mismatch Of Appetites
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“My wife and I have vastly different needs in the bedroom. I could do it every single day and still want more, but she’s on the other end of the spectrum. She seems like she could probably go without it forever and be fine. We only ever do it when I initiate, and even then, not every time I initiate (maybe once or twice a week tops). I’ve talked about it with her several times, and each time she’s said, ‘I understand your needs; I’ll initiate more often,’ but every time, she never does. And I resent it horribly. I’ve done my best to control my own needs to not ask for it as much for her sake, but she’s never done the same. She knows it’s an issue but does nothing. It sucks.
In the same vein, I told her the other day (somewhat offhandedly) that I definitely like a nice rack. She laughed and we went on our way. Then a few days later, she asked me what my ‘ideal size’ would be, and I told her that hers would always be my favorite, no matter their size (she’s a 32C right now, but they were smaller when we started dating). She said ‘No, that’s just a cop-out. Tell me how big you wish my chest was.’ And I replied ‘I told you, the size you’re at is perfect. Don’t worry about it.’ In all honesty, I really do wish she had a bigger chest, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings by saying so. Her self-image matters to me and I didn’t want to damage that.
This is such a deep dark secret to me because I love my wife. I love her dearly with all of my heart, and I’d never trade her or our love for anything in the whole world. Those two above-mentioned things are literally the only things I wouldn’t consider perfect about our relationship, yet I’m letting myself get so hung up over it. I feel like a terrible husband because I’m fretting over such shallow things that really don’t matter much in the long run. It sucks and I hate it and I hate myself for it.”
When Everything Goes Gray
“A few years ago I noticed I started lacking with my emotions. I didn’t think much of it because I couldn’t, and still can’t, afford therapy. I also thought it would just pass. Well, it hasn’t. What really reminded me of this lack of emotions was when my SO asked what I would do and how I would feel if she died. I thought about it and nothing came to me, I couldn’t even imagine myself upset about it. I lied and told her I would probably be depressed for 6 months to a year and eventually work myself out of it and start looking for a new person to share my life with. I only said that because I knew it’s what she wanted to hear, as she has this weird thing about me not being alone. She smiled and went back to watching TV.
I continued to think about other important people in my life dying. Honestly, I didn’t care. My youngest brother just got his Eagle Scout award; we had a ceremony for it and everything. I didn’t feel a thing. I think my mom may be noticing because she asked about my mental health at my brother’s celebration, but I lied and said I was just really tired. I know my mom is too busy moving to bring it up again. I haven’t told anyone because I don’t want them stopping their lives to try and help me out. By November this year, I’ll have a couple of debts paid off, and I’ll be able to afford therapy, which will be good for me because I have more baggage than just my current lack of emotions.”
Doomed To Remain Unmarried
“My boyfriend is firmly anti-marriage. He disagrees with it in principle. He was upfront about that from the beginning. When we met, I was fine with that. But now I’m not so sure that I am. I didn’t believe that I could feel about anyone the way I feel about him. Our relationship is the most wonderful thing in my life, and I love him so freaking much. But the more I think about it, the less okay I am being a girlfriend forever. I want more. I want to be his wife. I want him to be my husband. Given the choice of getting married or breaking up, he would choose to break up. So we talked when I started having these feelings of ‘I’m not sure I’m okay with that,’ but I didn’t push any further because I’m not positive that it’s a deal breaker. It isn’t that I just want to be married period or anything like that—it’s him. And now I feel like if I firmly need to marry him, that could be the end of our relationship. And then what? I’m alone and able to date a sea of people that I wouldn’t want to marry. Or the other option—I try to push those feelings aside and hope that it doesn’t get too painful to manage or grow into resentment?
I feel doomed.”