The following AskReddit users share the moment they realized they "crossed the line" and took something "too far."
_Source list available at the end. _
Hair Colors
I thought that doing a really over the top hair color would be great. My blue hair faded to green, so I tried bleaching the green out, which just made it platinum blonde with electric green streaks. Then, I tried dying it red to correct the green, which just made my hair turn neon pink with weird dark purple splotches.
I have gone way too far into experimenting. I’m going back to blonde as soon as I can, and I’m done with all of these weird colors. I’m sick of hearing people say, “I could never have hair like that. I have a job.” Yeah, I have a job too. At least I know what people are staring at when I catch them looking at me.
Pizza Eating Competition
One of my roommates challenged a friend to a pizza eating competition, which was eating an entire 22″ pizza by yourself in a one sitting. The man did it, too.
Facebook Mom Group Fights
When I got into a 2-day back-and-forth argument on a Facebook mom group. I actually had to step back and ask myself, “Is this really who I want to be? A mom arguing with another mom on a group.” I really could have used my son’s napping time way more productively.
Bad Trip
I was tripping on my third day in a row at my first really big festival. The only effect it was having was giving me intensely negative thoughts. I tried to enjoy myself, but I just couldn’t do it. Eventually, I decided that the only way out of this bad trip was to do more drugs. So, I ate a couple of pink pills. Everything started getting intense, and I had to hide in my car for a while. I think that was the moment that I realized I had gone too far. It was when the sky turned red and the lighting bolts from the incoming storm felt like they were blowing up right in front of my face. Good times.
Facebook Stalking
Finding my ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend’s criminal record. I was like, “Okay, this is weird. I know way too much about this girl that I have never met and will probably never meet.” But sometimes, I still check her Facebook because I want to see if she’s posted pictures of him (which she hasn’t).
Binge Watching
Binge watching a series till 6am.
Book Collection
I was cleaning my bookshelf and rearranging my books just this Thursday. I thought “This is way too many books, and I haven’t even read most of them.” I’m spending way too much to buy them, and I don’t even make time to actually use it for its intended purpose.
Instigator
I was stirring up stuff between two members at my school, and they ended up fighting right in front of the principles office. One of them got expelled, and I felt like such an instigator.
Deleted
House Numbers
I was looking for my friends house. His house number was 1280. I saw the house numbers 1210, 1240, and 1260. I knew I was getting closer, but then I saw 1290. I had gone too far.
Anonymous
Driving Etiquette
I got cut off in traffic by a young punk in a challenger, so I followed him for 20 miles. He pulled into a gas station, started apologizing, and then tried to give me money.
Wrong Turn
My mom and I were driving to L.A. (down the U.S. Interstate 5 in California) and took a wrong turn into the mountains. One hour later, we realized that we had gone TOO FAR. There were warning explosion signs and craters on the sides of the road. Turns out, we had made a wrong turn into a Government explosive manufacturing and testing facility. Oops.
Little White Lies
Not my story, but a story my brother-in-law told me a couple of years ago.
He was starting his own business, but he was still working full-time. He decided to take a few sick days here and there and use the time to work on his own business. Obviously, after a while, his employer started getting a little bit pissed with him taking so much time off, so he had to go to the doctor’s to keep his “illness” going.
He told the doctor that he was having stomach and bowel problems, and after a few weeks, the docs obviously couldn’t find the right course of action to cure him. He then proceeded to tell me that he thought he had taken it too far. I asked why and he proceeded to tell me that he now has to get a colonoscopy done, so that they can find the “cause.”
Deleted
Forbidden Make Out Session
I made out with an engaged girl a few times in the months before she was able to move across state with her fiancé. I did a lot of self-reflection after that.
Savings
A few weeks ago, I looked at my bank account and realized that I had about $5 left that had to last me about a week. I looked at my report and realized that I had spent half of my paycheck on video games (with about $200 of it on game items). I did some more research and estimated that I had spent around $1200 on in-game content for a free to play MMO. I haven’t touched my computer in weeks- as I go through a kind of intervention.
Pretend Rockstar Relative
I convinced all of my coworkers that I was related to an older rockstar but that he’s estranged from our family. We have the same last name, and I read up on his life to make sure it seemed plausible. They completely believed me. They have asked me to get tickets to his shows and periodically bring up my “uncle.” There is no way out of this now.
Bad Credit
Each month when I view my credit card statement.
Anger Management
When I broke a button on my PS4 controller because I was mad at a video game, then because I was mad at myself for breaking the controller, I broke the back off a chair.
Sweet Tooth
After I finished my third bag of Reese’s peanut butter cups.
Break and Enter
When I almost got caught while breaking into a well-known sports stadium with my two cousins.
Online Game Addict
I got really sucked into an online game called Dominion years ago. Heck, I don’t even remember how long ago it was. I remember there was a bunch of races that you could pick. You would build up your own civilization (it was all text-based), and after a while, you could attack other people and steal their land or explore the land yourself. Every hour was a “tick” or something where things would advance, either buildings or attacks or whatever.
At first, it was a fun thing my group of online friends would play. We never really pushed for high ranks each season. We just had fun with it. Eventually, though, I got really hardcore into it. Finished eleventh one season. In order to do that, I had tons of alarms set for when troops would come in, land would come in, etc.
It was absurd. I barely slept at all cause I was constantly getting up to check things or send my guys out or whatnot. I was out of high school, but I still lived at home, so I had to be completely silent in order to avoid alerting my parents of what I was doing (to avoid all of their questions).
One night, I almost got caught at about 2 a.m. and ended up sitting in the dark completely still for 2 hours while I waited for my father to come down stairs, get on the computer, and then finally go outside. All so I could get back on the computer, finish what I was doing, and go back to bed.
It was at that point that I finally realized how stupid it was getting and stopped playing hardcore. I transitioned to a peaceful play style and then stopped playing a couple seasons later.
Ding-Dong Ditch
My friends and I would ding-dong ditch random houses in high school. We stopped after my friend got a gun pulled to his face.
Pretended To Be Another Race
I accidentally pretended that my wife was black for a while. Long story short, my wife and I are white. Our youngest son is adopted and is biracial (black/white). I started taking him to a majority black barbershop when he was around 2-years-old because our local barbers didn’t seem to know how to cut it right. They were talking about something and said, “Well, you would know since you’re married to a black girl.” I just laughed and nodded. I should have explained the situation, but I didn’t. When I kept going back, they would make references to me having a black wife and started asking questions about being in an interracial relationship (Some of them were in interracial relationships, and the topic came up from time to time), I realized I was in too deep. I did eventually come clean, and everyone thought it was hilarious.
Fake Tinder Profile
Last summer, a good friend of mine was always on tinder every time I would see him swiping on girls. A buddy of mine thought it would be a funny idea to make a fake tinder profile and try and match with him and basically just catfish him. We made a profile posing as some attractive woman and actually manage to match with him and talk to him for two weeks. It was all fun and games until things started to get weird and sexual. My buddy and I both looked at each other and agreed this had gone too far. We deleted the profile and never talked about it again.
Leaving Comments
When I started digging through other peoples Reddit profiles, so I could get back at them for having a different opinion.
eBay Red Flags
When I was around fourteen, I stole my parent’s credit card to buy flags on eBay. After probably the 50th flag, they got suspicious about how I was getting all of these flags, so I realized I had to stop. I’m not sure how they didn’t get suspicious earlier on though.
Office Prank
A coworker (we’ll call him Jack) missed like a week of work after he injured his ankle playing basketball with his kids. He had just turned 40, so a few of us were joking that he was getting too old to be giving 100% against them. (He’s ultra competitive, and they’re fairly athletic.)
A couple of days before he could come back, another coworker (Alex) mentioned that he had a wheelchair at home from when his wife broke her ankle. I had this bright idea that we just had to replace Jack’s desk chair with the wheelchair.
So during lunch, Alex and I take off to his house, climb up into his attic, and load up the wheelchair. Getting back to work was when I had the “we have gone too far” moment. See, my work is surrounded by barbed wire fencing and requires a special car pass to be able to drive a car in. But there’s no way we’re pushing this thing through the turnstile that we would normally use, so we get a car pass from our admin assistant, drive in, unload the wheelchair, and hide the original desk chair in a third coworker’s cubicle.
It received a good laugh, and Jack actually used the chair as his desk chair for a few weeks just to enjoy the prank. It was just a few months after that we learned this could’ve been seen as age-related harassment, so it’s definitely not something I’d ever do again. Thankfully though, Jack really loved that we’d put in so much work just to make a joke at his expense.
We also printed an info packet for those chair lifts that help the elderly go up stairs and hung that on his cubicle wall. In retrospect, so glad he took it well.
Photoshop Memes
When I would take my school administrators and photoshop their heads onto meme templates to make fun of them, or the one time that I took my artist friend’s work and parodied it in MS Paint.
My Portfolio
I was building my portfolio document for 50 straight hours. I was done at 3 am, and I did not get out of my chair until 7am (just nit picking and optimizing tiny things).
Protection
I was at a small rock club, and some guy pushed me. Without thinking, I pushed him back. Turns out he had a friend, and they were both bigger than me.
My first thought was, “Well damn.”
Then two even bigger guys magically appeared behind me and said to the first two, “Do you have a problem with our friend?”
The first two guys quickly left, and after I profusely thanked the two giants, they told me the saw the guy push me first for no reason. They thought the first two guys were just looking for an excuse to fight someone smaller than them, and they didn’t really want a fair fight.
Turns out they were right and saved me from getting my butt kicked.
For The Wrong Reasons
When my girlfriend bluntly asked me, “When are we going to get married?”
I realized that this relationship I had started was because I was lonely and wanted someone (anyone) in my life, and now, it had gone too far.
Bullying
I was 12-years-old and pretty rude as a kid. I sat next to this girl in class who I would pick on everyday, until one day, my insults made her cry. Young me was so in shock that I ran away from the scene.
She confronted me the next day saying how she was sorry if she had annoyed me, and I ended up crying too.
Posts are edited for clarity.