The Confessions

"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 applied for a job my colleague had told me about in confidence, one she was about to apply for herself. I got it. She found out. She said she understood. She did not speak to me voluntarily for a year."

"I did not say goodbye to my best friend before he died. We had argued about something trivial and I was waiting for him to apologise first. He was gone before either of us backed down. That argument was about nothing. The silence it created was about everything."

"I have caught myself hoping, briefly, that something would go wrong for people who seem to have everything. Not seriously. Not with any real wish for harm. But the flicker of it is there sometimes and I do not like what it says about me."

"I confessed about not visiting a friend in hospital because I was afraid. I cannot undo that. But I showed up for another friend last month who was going through something difficult. I sat with them in the same kind of silence I had once been too afraid to offer. It felt like paying something forward."

"I have wished, in dark moments, that certain people from my past would encounter difficulty. Not harm. Just difficulty. Enough to understand something of what they made me feel. I am not proud of the arithmetic of that."

"I read my teenage daughters diary. I found nothing alarming but I violated her trust completely. She is twenty six now and we are close. I have never told her. I think about it whenever she tells me something in confidence."

"I was given too much change in a shop once. A significant amount, nearly thirty pounds. I noticed immediately and walked out. I have never gone back to that shop since, partly from shame and partly because I do not want to return the money."

"I have been mentally checked out of my job for two years but I am too afraid of the financial uncertainty to leave. Every day I give about forty percent of what I am capable of. My employer thinks I am performing well. I know what I could actually do if I cared."

"I was jealous of my sister her whole life. Better grades, more friends, prettier, funnier. I never told her I was proud of her even when I was. She moved abroad five years ago and we barely speak. I think my jealousy drove that distance and I have only recently been able to admit it."