The Confessions

"I quit a creative project I had worked on for three years because one person told me it was not good enough. I believed them and I should not have. I have wondered ever since what would have happened if I had kept going."

"I confessed here about the argument that kept me from saying goodbye to my best friend. I cannot change that. But I wrote to his wife last month. Just to say I thought about him often and that I was sorry for the argument and the silence. She called me. We talked for an hour. Something healed."

"I did not visit my father in his final weeks in hospital because I told myself I was too busy with work. The truth is I was afraid. When he died I had not seen him in two months. I will carry that forever."

"I told someone a secret about a third party that changed how they saw that person permanently and irreparably. The secret was true. But it was not mine to tell and the telling of it served no purpose except to make me feel like the person with interesting information."

"I borrowed fifteen hundred pounds from a friend eight years ago and paid back a thousand saying I would settle the rest the following month. I never did. We are still friends. The debt sits between us like a word neither of us will say."

"I pretended not to see an elderly woman struggling with her shopping on a bus. I was tired and did not want to give up my seat. Someone else got up eventually. She thanked them warmly. I sat there for six more stops feeling like the worst person on the bus."

"I never said I love you back to someone who said it to me because I panicked. They laughed it off. We never spoke of it again. We are friends still. But something shifted that day and I think we both know it."

"I broke up with someone who was genuinely good to me because my friends did not like them. I let other peoples opinions override my own heart. They married someone else last year. They look happy. I still wonder."

"I told my family I could not make it home for Christmas one year because of work. I stayed home alone by choice. I just needed to not perform happiness for one year. Nobody knows that. They think I was miserable being away. I was the most peaceful I had been in years."

"I have been hiding the true extent of my debt from my family for four years. The number is significant. I have managed it alone because I am too ashamed to ask for help from people who would give it without question. The loneliness of carrying it is worse than the debt itself."