I’ve been in a strictly sexual relationship with a first cousin for the last five years. We only ever saw each other once or twice a year growing up before she moved to the other side of the country and then never really saw or interacted with each other again until 5 years ago when she moved back. What started as us meeting up one in awhile has become a regular thing in the last few months. It’s escalated to the point where we’re now sexting each other.I’m scared to death of what might happen if anyone in our family finds out but I don’t want to stop what’s happening either.

Some guy convinced naive 15 year old me to send nudes and then used it against me for 6 months. He found me on Facebook and threatened to send them to my friends list if I didn’t do whatever he asked me too. He would make me get online whenever he asked and have me masturbate for him. He even tried to get me to meet up with him in person. I got really lucky when his profiles just disappeared one day and I took that opportunity to delete every social media account I had. I haven’t gone back since and I never will. It really fucked me up for a while but I don’t really have anyone to blame but myself. It’s been 6 years since and I still haven’t told anyone I know this story.

I get paid a six figure salary for a standard 40 hour a week corporate job for a massive well known company. In a given week I do maybe an hour of actual work, the rest of the time I am on social media or youtube slacking off. I thought when I got this job that eventually someone would figure out I don’t do anything all day but here I am 14 years later still doing fuck all and getting paid a lot for it.

I once helped out my a female friend’s family by taking care of their cat for a week. Every day for a week, I would go over there and snoop around their house. I found my friend’s diary, and proceeded to read the entire thing. I used this information to get her to like me, and she is currently my wife.

Cousin died when we were both seventeen. There was a reception at his house just after the funeral. I went into his room and stole all the money that was there, took some other valuables that his parents wouldn’t realize were gone. No one knows that I did it, they just assumed he didn’t have any money in his room, only loose change. I don’t regret it, but I will never admit I did it.

I run a cake business. I charge people hundreds for wedding cakes… Every last one is made using Pilsbury cake mix I buy for $1 a box at Walmart. I suck at baking. Every time I’ve ever tried to make a cake from scratch it sucked. But baking is like.. My whole deal. My friends all call me the cake girl. It’s like my whole life is a lie. People compliment my cakes all the time. Telling me how delicious they are. Telling me it’s so much better than box mix cake. Telling me they could never bake a cake so delicious. Well guess what? For $1, they too can make a cake just as delicious. Just add oil, eggs and water. In my defense, I love cake decorating. I make all of the frostings and fondant from scratch. I just hate baking fucking cakes!! I base my prices mostly on the decoration of the cakes and not of the cake itself of that makes sense. Still… No one knows about this except my husband. Even my best friends think I fucking slave over the oven mixing and baking these damn cakes. I have been doing this for YEARS. If anyone knew my business and reputation would be in the toilet for sure. :/ I keep telling myself I have to learn how to make the damn cakes without the box mixes, but I never do it. I feel like such a sham sometimes.

I am basically living a lie. I told my entire family I was able to transfer out of community college and into a university, but I never finished up the requirements. So since I live at home, every day instead of going to school I go to the local library and bs. My lies are so extensive, I even go to the campus and meet my girlfriend for lunch sometimes. I’ve made fake transcripts to show my family, and to make it look like I’m actually studying I go to MIT opencourseware to look up facts that I “learned in class” that day. I have become a remarkable liar. I hope to be transferring in the fall and then I look forward to living a normal life. Coming clean is not an option at this point.

I came very, very close to committing a school shooting I was picked on A LOT in high school. I think it was because I tried so hard to be cool and everyone saw right through it. There were these 4 cowboy jock types that gave it to me the worst. After being publicly humiliated and beaten in front of a girl I liked (as she laughed/cheered), I decided that none of it was worth it anymore. I had no support at home being an only child and having parents that worked constantly, and cutting and burning myself didn’t make me feel better anymore. So I got my dad’s handgun out of the gun-safe (he uses the same combo for everything, the idiot) and brought it to school with me the next day. I can’t adequately describe to you guys how ready I was to kill these four. I had absolutely no fear or doubt in my mind. I wanted nothing more than to show everyone what happens when you push someone over the edge like they did. I had the gun tucked in my waistline. I was wearing this baggy pair of cargo shorts that i wore a couple times a week that day. I remember walking towards the cowboy’s table, so goddamn ready for it to be over, when the gun fell out of my waistline, down my left short leg and made the loudest fucking sound as it hit the cafeteria floor. I tried my best to grab the gun real quick, but people saw what it was and screamed, and one of the instructors tackled me to the ground. They eventually concluded that I had brought the gun to school to impress people with badassery, and had no intention of using it. I was expelled and sent to live at a youth ranch in Idaho until I was 18. I did have the intention of using it though. I was going to kill all of them. I’m 24 now, and I still think about it all the time. I have not recovered from high school. I’m still terrified of people in general, and avoid having relationships because of what I fear I’m capable of.

A while back, I was cheating on my wife with a coworker. It went on for months, and I never really cared for the woman I was cheating with. She was super hot, though. After a while my coworker started getting really crazy and threatening to tell my wife (whom I had a child with and a baby on the way) about everything. Obviously, I kept trying to cut things off because I realized I was making a mistake. She lost it one night and was freaking out and texting me telling me she was going to come to my house, and a drunk driver hit her. She died instantly. No one knows I was having an affair, and my family went to her funeral.

I had a baby with sperm donated from a man who advertised on craigslist. If my very religious family found out it wasn’t an “accident” I would be completely shunned and disowned. I am a female who is ugly. NO, that’s not the secret. But.. I AM ugly because I have a facial deformity that I was born with. I’ve never had a long term partner and only had sex a few times in my life. My biological clock was ticking LOUDLY and I desperately wanted a child – there wasn’t going to be time enough to meet someone and my odds were none existent as a middle-aged, ugly female. I own my home, have a career – but I didn’t want to lose all my savings to pay to have it done through a clinic and sperm donation, etc. It would have been at least $15K per try. My chances of adopting were also almost none existent as any women looking to adopt her baby out isn’t going to pick the ugly, middle aged lady to adopt their baby, plus is crazy freaking expensive. I wanted the money I had in savings, etc.. to toward raising the child. So I turned to Craigslist and got it for free. My child is a preschooler now and I’ve never been happier or more fulfilled! I pinch myself every day because my child is in my life and I feel so fucking lucky. Every day is a dream come true and I savor each and every moment. I try to be the best mom I can be in every way. Parenting really makes you take a long, hard look at yourself and how you show up in the world. I parent from my heart. I regularly send pictures and updates to the generous and selfless man who trusted me on a hand shake.

On the outside, I am a happily married 30-something, about to buy a house, in sync with my wife on most things like religion, kids, that things will get better for us, etc. In reality, I am a deeply depressed, secret alcoholic (which I fear is already adversely affecting my health, but I can’t stop), don’t believe in any higher power anymore and derive little or no pleasure or satisfaction from anything. Most of this started with a sudden and untimely death of my mom, and some other family drama that happened around the same time while I was in university. I powered my way through there because I was encouraged to by those around me, even though I wanted so badly to drop out. This is also about the time I started abusing alcohol, I barely drank at all before. My family is rather scattered now, living in different states. My wife and I are close, but I have been unwilling (unable?) to find or make new, meaningful friends as an adult in the city I moved to for a job. I am so stressed: I feel pins and needles in my brain/head and tongue constantly, and drink heavily (5-10 drinks/units per day most of the time, sometimes more, I can hold off if I am traveling or around family (or in a situation where I can’t drink at all). I don’t even get really that drunk visibly anymore, which is why (I think) I hide it well from my wife. There is usually an empty vodka bottle hidden in my briefcase by the time she gets back from work, and I have usually poured my “first glass of wine” by then to mask that I have already been drinking (I get home from work earlier than she). She thinks I am as happy and fulfilled as she and excited and ready to have kids and start a family, etc. etc. In truth I am just numb to this world. I try to love her, I think I do, and expend all of my energy keeping up the facade and affection for her. But apart from that I have zero energy or desire for anything. I used to be athletic, and still look decent, but my physical shape is fading fast. I don’t have or enjoy any hobbies. I just wake up, go to work, drink when I can, and mark off the days as I get older and closer to eventually dying. I don’t know what to do. Tried therapy back in the day, and meds, didn’t seem to help. I just am trying to make life ok for the people around me who I don’t want to see be like me inside, mostly my wife. But beyond that I feel like I have totally missed the boat and am past satisfaction or having any meaningful place in the world.

My whole professional life is built on a lie and it’s about ready to come down. When I was 22 I was in a bad way — halfway through my bachelor’s degree, but with a building addiction to opiates and some mental health issues. Summer of that year I was in a bad car accident — in addition to broken bones throughout my body, my head went through the window and my face received severe lacerations that required hundreds of stitches to close and left me looking very rough. As tough as that was to deal with, I also now know that I sustained a traumatic brain injury that left me very confused, angry, and overwhelmed by life in general. I wanted to keep up appearances, so after taking three months off to recover I tried to go back to school. Within the first week I knew I couldn’t handle it. Too many questions about what happened, too much anxiety, and I had lost pretty much all my coping skills. When I got overwhelmed (which happened often), I would feel sick and scared and literally forget where I was and what I was doing. It was frightening and embarrassing, especially for someone like me who had always had high expectations placed on my shoulders by those around me. I had lost pretty much all my friends at this point, and in my mental state, I thought that those who remained would abandon me if they knew how much I was struggling. So, I told everyone that it was going great. Every day I would I leave the house for six hours and drive. Sometimes I would stop in a parking lot, sometimes I would just keep driving all day. I would find cheap used textbooks at college bookstores so that I could bring them home and “study.” I created elaborate lies about my classes and my professors in order to have stories to tell when people asked how it was going. I kept telling myself that I was just doing this until my brain worked again, and that next quarter I would go back for real when I could actually handle it. Problem is, things just kept getting worse, and as time went on I became less able to get back on track. This went on for 2.5 years, until I was supposed to be graduating. So, I lied about that too. I forged transcripts and came up with stories of why I didn’t want to work in the field of my degree and hoped to move past it. I got a labor job and slowly found things working themselves out as my brain chemistry improved and steady work kept me from completely destroying myself. Eventually I had to move. For the first time in over a decade, I was finally free of my opiate addiction and starting to feel part of the world again, but I was still carrying the lie of my college degree. I volunteered in some places related to that field and they really liked me. They liked me so much, in fact that they hired me on an emergency basis (no transcripts required) and I’ve worked there ever since. Now, three years into my sobriety and seemingly a lifetime removed from the pain of those years, they want to promote me to a career-level job that I would absolutely love. I’m so good at what I do and it brings me so much joy, but this promotion would come with scrutiny and background checks that I know I can’t stand up to. When I was so depressed, I honestly didn’t think I’d even live this long, so while I knew that my lies could create this situation, I never prepared for it. Worse than losing this job would be having everyone around me find out what happened, so I am at a point now where I have to quit what I love because they like me too much. I plan to go back to school for real and I think I’ll do well, but the shame and regret of this situation is something I don’t think I’ll ever shake.