The Confessions

"I have never told my oldest friend that there was a period of about two years where I found our friendship difficult. She was going through something hard and I was not in a place to give what she needed. I showed up but not fully. I am not sure she ever noticed. I noticed."

"I never told my father I was proud of him. He worked himself to exhaustion for our family and I took it completely for granted. He passed away three years ago. I have said the words out loud to an empty room since then. It is not the same."

"I never apologised to a boy I was unkind to at school. Not severely. But consistently enough that I know it affected him. I have seen him once since, as adults. I recognised him immediately. He may not have recognised me. I walked past without stopping."

"I never congratulated a colleague who got something they had worked incredibly hard for because I was too consumed by my own disappointment at not getting it myself. I sent a brief email. It was cold. They deserved warmth and I could not find it that day."

"I have never told my mother that the year she remarried was the hardest year of my childhood. She was so happy and I did not want to take that from her. I am forty three now. That year still lives in me and she has no idea."

"There is someone I have loved quietly from a distance for four years. They are in a relationship. I have never said a word. I do not intend to. But carrying it alone is its own particular weight."

"I never told my therapist the real reason I started seeing them. I told a version that was true but not the whole truth. We worked for two years on the presenting issue. The real one I have never said to anyone."

"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 have never told my children I struggled with their early years. That the relentlessness of it nearly broke me. They are teenagers and I present as a parent who found it natural and joyful. I did find joy. I also found despair. They should probably know both are possible."

"I have never told a single person about the worst thing I have ever done. I have confessed adjacent things. Carried it in different shapes. But the actual thing, the real weight of it, has never been spoken. Writing even this much feels like something."