We leave skeletons in the closet for a reason. For these people, if anyone went snooping around and found out these secrets, their entire lives would be over in an instant. Stories have been edited for clarity.
Because Of Their Issues, They Literally Understand The Mind Of A Serial Killer
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“This is something I’m ashamed of and my friends would never be able to see me the same again.
A while ago, I was very, VERY depressed and on meds for something I didn’t even have. On top of that, I had been intimately abused and was very confused about my feelings towards different genders (still kinda am tbh.) On top of that, I had an unhealthy obsession with a certain celebrity. It was a bizarre infatuation, a combination of hatred fueled by jealousy and obsessed fascination. It all culminated in me fantasizing about what it would feel like to murder him. It would be the ultimate act of physical dominance, to have his life under my ultimate control. I would stalk him at a convention, sneak backstage at a panel and enjoy the confused look in all of his pathetic fangirls’ eyes as I took away their hero’s life- and then my own.
Fortunately, a little time passed between me starting to habitually have this disturbing fantasy and finally getting meaningful help. I stayed in an outpatient mental health rehab program for a month and worked on the underlying problems causing me to have these desires- being socially isolated, having few meaningful friendships, and being confused about which gender I liked. For a long time, I had to stop seeing this person’s content to prevent a relapse into hateful thoughts. Now, though, I’m perfectly able to watch their videos with no ill effects. However, I will never be able to forget the strange and confusing feelings I had towards them. I feel like I understand the mentality behind acts of public violence a little better now.”
Turning To The Internet For “Friends” Was The Last Thing She Should’ve Done
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“So I had a pretty crazy childhood. My parents violently hated each other and battled in court and in person for years. Also around this time, I got really sick with a certain disease. Now because of this disease, I wasn’t able to go to school and basically spent 90% of my life at home with only my dog, sister, and mother. I had no friends and not that much of a support system. I was lonely and desperate for attention and love that I was not getting from my narcissistic parents. So, like many 12-year-old girls, I turned towards the internet.
My mom had recently gotten a laptop that I could use. Though it had to stay downstairs, that wasn’t a problem. I was an insomniac and spent my time downstairs watching TV. Well, I learned about chat rooms and spent a lot of time in there, not realizing teen chat rooms were full of older guys. Well, older guys really have a thing for young girls. I don’t remember how it started, but I started messaging intimate stuff to guys in chat rooms. This turned into mutual touching ourselves on webcams. See, I was a hyper-aware kid. I had learned about touching myself from a young age and had watched smut since I was, like, 8. I read Nora Roberts and had many fantasies about fooling around with older guys. Now, this wasn’t a few guys. This was tons. Some only lasted 10 minutes and others I had relationships with for months. They were usually aged between 16-25, I think. Every time I did it, I felt horrible and dirty, but I went back every night.
They complimented me and told me I was pretty. Some even had boyfriend/girlfriend relationships with me and made me feel loved and wanted. Though I knew that many times I was being catfished by old dudes, I’m sure. I was even blackmailed by one guy who said he had taken screenshots of me while naked and who later made me do things to myself while he watched.
This whole webcam and chat room thing lasted for a few years. I was horribly depressed and alone and, for some reason, it made me feel like I had power. I think it lasted for 3-4 years. I’ve blocked a lot of that time out. I once told my older sister and she cried so hard. She’s quite a bit older and I’ve rarely seen her cry. I didn’t understand at the time why she was so upset. But as an adult with a niece almost to that age, I understand now how horrible it was. I was basically making child smut. I will admit a lot of it is my fault, but I do believe at some points I was manipulated. There were some guys who strung me along for years just by appealing to me emotionally. I was numb for years and sometimes still have trouble with seeking love out from the wrong people.
I thankfully never feel the need to do this anymore. I have a pretty healthy intimate life and had some decent relationships. Although my personal touching myself fantasizes can be on the extreme or odd side and I like some odd smut. Some that I’m often ashamed of. I hope as I get older I can continue to heal.”
These Bullies Pushed Him Over The Edge
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“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 four 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 weapon out of the 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 weapon 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 gosh darn ready for it to be over when the weapon fell out of my waistline, down my left short leg and made the loudest freaking sound as it hit the cafeteria floor. I tried my best to grab the weapon 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 weapon to school to impress people as an absolute boss, 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.”
Their Love Life Will Always Be Based In Lies
“I’ve been out of the closet as bi, if not gay, for a few years now. The only people that don’t know are my family, with good reason. They are the uber-religious type that I have zero doubt would kick me to the curb and never speak to me again. To illustrate, I wasn’t allowed to play Pokemon or read Harry Potter till middle/high school because dragons and magic are hateful and evil. I’m at a point in my life where I am capable of supporting myself, I’m just living with them to save money and pay off loans, so I could survive. But my family is still important to me, and they are actually very loving, despite what it may seem. They’re just very traditional. I can practically hear my mom telling me through a phone call, ‘I still love you, but every time I see you, my heart breaks knowing that my baby is going to down below.’ My best case scenario would be them denying it and saying that I’m confused, especially since I still am attracted to women, just not quite as much, or the ones I do like tend to not reciprocate. Therefore, I’ve pretty much become okay with the fact that they will just never get to know what’s going on in that part of my life. I rarely lie to them, I just use gender-neutral pronouns, or just avoid saying a gender altogether. They’ve only asked for clarification on my date’s gender once, so that’s just about the only time.
Speaking of which, this has understandably caused my dating life to be a bit of a crap-shoot. A lot of guys, understandably, don’t want to be seen as a secret, so they aren’t interested in a relationship. And the girls I have dated quickly turn jealous and possessive, scared that I will leave them for a guy. The ones that don’t tend to see me more as gay, and so are shocked when I ask them out, and not really interested.
Crazy thing is, I’m still fairly religious, and I have talked to several pastors within my church about it. They’ve been accepting, but just ask that I not do the deed with men (which is honestly something I could count on one hand anyway). But even with their support, I have no doubt my parents would still remove me from their lives.
It’s caused quite the heaviness in my life for the past 5-10 years, but I’ve come to the point where I’ve gotten used to it and learned to cope. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.”
Their Childhood Beginnings Couldn’t Have Started Out Any Weirder Than They Already Did
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“A bit of background, I’m a guy in my late 20s who was taken into foster care at age 7. Everyone around me already knows that I was brought up by foster families because I had a crappy early childhood. I deliberately keep it vague and say stuff like ‘I’d rather not go into it’ so that people will just assume I was abused in some way and they’ll stop asking about it.
The truth is that for the first 7 years of my life, I was brought up as a girl by my psycho birth mother who really, really, really wanted a daughter and didn’t let the snag of giving birth to a boy stop her from trying to raise one.
She was a pretty successful professional in a legal field (not entirely sure what) and had me via anonymous sperm donor from a fertility clinic. She found out I was a boy at a late ultrasound and then moved across the country. She gave birth to me at home and continued to move about until I was 5 or so. It was just the two of us all my life, we had contact with other people, of course, but they rarely got very close. I had lots of friends but was always supervised.
I found out long, long after that my mother’s strong puritanical Christianity was a lie she used to explain why she was so strict about me being ‘private’ and never letting anyone see me get changed or anything. I just accepted all of this as fact, having never been told anything different.
I was sent to a religious school for girls and had a really great childhood. I was a bit of a tomboy and played with lego and toy animals, rather than dolls and stuff, but that’s not unusual and no one ever questioned if I was a girl, even me. I knew about men and women but had never really seen much of naked people. My mother never ever spoke to me about it, but I kinda had the impression that when I grew up and got a chest and stuff, my junk would kinda fall off or something and I would be a woman, and other kids would keep their junks and they’d be men. I dunno, to be honest, I never really thought about it.
Anyway, I carried on with my happy girlhood and had a bunch of friends and everything was great until I was 7 and a teacher accidentally spilled a cup of hot coffee over me at school. The liquid soaked through my clothes and was scalding me so much that the staff immediately stripped me out of my dress and underwear to get the hot coffee away from my skin. And then they found out.
The cops were called and I got taken to speak with who I guess would be Social Services. They asked me a bunch of questions about life at home and stuff. Meanwhile, my mother was taken in for questioning too. She refused to acknowledge me as male and insisted I was her daughter. Because she was, you know, delusional and stuff, I wasn’t allowed to go back home but got put with a foster family and went through loads of therapy and stuff.
The worst part was that literally overnight, I lost EVERYTHING. My mother, my home, all my toys, all my clothes. I moved school so I also lost all my friends, they cut all my hair off and told me I wasn’t a girl anymore. It was really really traumatic.
The first foster home wasn’t that great. They had three boys already and going from a sheltered, ‘religious’ only-child upbringing to a rough-and-tumble testosterone-filled environment was really difficult. They tried to force me to be masculine and I was just too confused about what they wanted. Anything ‘girly’ was reprimanded and I felt so lost and alone because nothing I did was right.
I tried to commit suicide when I was 11 and again at 13 because I didn’t feel I fit in anywhere. After the second attempt, they moved me to a different foster family, who were awesome. I consider them to be my parents. They actually stood up for me, the first thing was that they let me grow my hair. From when I got taken into care, they buzzed my hair short, and I hated it. They always had to hold me down and do it forcibly while I was crying and fighting. My new parents flatly refused to do it and said that loads of boys had long hair. They also let me quit karate and football and take up swimming and jazz dance. Since I’d been in care, no one had ever stood up for my right to choose what activities to do, or how to dress before. It was amazing.
In the end, I came out of it with a pretty healthy gender identity (I’m a guy, but not the most butch guy ever, but I’m fine with that), I went through school and got my degree and have a pretty good job and an amazing, supportive wife. Everything looks great.
But I can never speak about my early childhood, and how I grew up as a little girl.”
If People Knew They Were A Sociopath, Their Life Would Have No One In It
“I suspect I’m somewhere on the sociopath spectrum. All my life I’ve been perceived as innocent, kind, compassionate, etc. Truthfully, I really don’t give a crap about most people. I don’t do nice things for other people to help them, I do it so they will have a high opinion of me. I don’t think I have an altruistic bone in my body.
I do feel love for a very small number of people (my sister, an ex, one of my kids), but not for many that I should love (my spouse, our other children, my parents, etc). Of course, I treat all these people as if I loved them.
The last few years, though, the mask slipped a bit. There was some legal trouble because I was careless and now there are people close to me who no longer trust me, and have started questioning everything they know about me. This is incredibly distressing to me, and it’s now my mission to build up their trust again, and ‘show’ them that I’m still the good person I always was.
My thoughts are often hateful, contemptuous, and impatient, and I lie routinely. However, I learned at a young age how to project sincerity and guilelessness. People trust me immediately upon meeting me. The mistakes I’ve made now have put that at risk, and I’m incredibly uncomfortable with the thought that anyone distrusts me. It’s like it threatens my self-image, even though I know very well that I’m not trustworthy.
I don’t think I’m a true sociopath, though, because I can feel empathy, I just mostly don’t care. Everything I do is just in my own self-interest. I’m not a narcissist, either, because I don’t have a very high opinion of myself and often suffer from depression and self-loathing. I don’t want to be the center of attention, I just want to be the person in the background that everyone trusts.”
His Cousin Literally Paid Him To Keep This Secret
“Ok, so this is a secret I’ve kept for nearly 20 years.
During the summers when I was growing up, my parents would often leave my brother and I (I’m male) with our aunt and uncle who lived out in the country. It was great as they had four sons of ages close to ours so we had a lot of fun doing kids stuff.
One summer when I was 8, the oldest cousin was maybe 16. We somehow got talking and he asked me if I wanted to sleep in his room that night. He had the nicest room and bed so I was all for it. I got into bed and he asked if he could touch my junk. I was 8 and just thought it was ok so I let him. He rubs it for a bit and then asks me to do the same to him. So I do. This progresses and eventually, I’m sucking his junk. I think I knew this was wrong so I said I didn’t want to carry on. We stop and I go to sleep, quite confused.
I woke up and he handed me some money and told me never to tell anyone about what happened. The next night, he tried to do the same thing, but now all I cared about was the money. So I do it. This carried on for two summers.
Eventually, I got old enough to realize it was quite wrong, regardless of the money, and stopped.
I’ve not told anyone this. He’s now married with two kids. I’m also married and we see them sometimes at family events. I don’t have the balls to even try and talk to him about it. Heck, I’m not even sure what I’d say; just getting it off my chest makes me feel better.”
They Weren’t Ready To Be Part Of This Smuggling Train
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“A few years ago I worked in a huge warehouse of about 105 people. The warehouse supplied the local ‘Chinatown’ in a large city in the U.K. The Chinatown businesses were mostly all owned by one billionaire (ironically from Japan) who gave each one of these businesses to one of his sons. He had six sons and there were only eight restaurants/fast food’s in the Chinatown district. Our warehouse supplied for 7/8 of those restaurants. I handled frozen food for some of the inbound trucks. I usually unloaded 300 boxes a day from trucks into the warehouse.
So one day, I was unloading boxes of shrimp when I came across a small unmarked box which was a different size than all the others. I set it aside until the end of the day and continued unloading.
When the end of the day came, I cut it open to see where it should go. And all I found was pills, about 2,000 pills, small greeny/blue pills with ‘I5X’ printed on them. I knew straight away that these weren’t flavor enhancing tablets or anything to do with the restaurants. I got paranoid and didn’t know what the heck to do. So I took about 20 pictures on my phone of the box, and the pills and took two pills and hid them in my boot. Then I resealed the box and left it in the truck.
A few days later (massively coincidental), police came snooping around the warehouse after someone was poisoned in one of the restaurants. They came asking about where we ordered our stock from.
I was scared pantsless of having the pills in my boot crumble and potentially poison me, so I confessed what I had found.
They informed me that they already had an open investigation into an illegal substance trade in Chinatown, but after a few months, they had nowhere else to look.
They took the pills as evidence and said they’d contact me in a few days. Weeks rolled by and I’d forgotten it. Out of the blue one day, about 30 officers showed up and started cuffing people, taking documents out of the offices, and seizing computers. A young officer pulled me outside to a van and told me that the pill I had found was the ‘missing key’ linking one of the billionaire’s son’s business and an illegal substance market coming in from Asia
After being questioned not much happened, except that 33 people got arrested, 17 got jail time, and four got deported.
Not sure what was going on, but apparently a bunch of Asian men and women were trafficking pills through the warehouse and into restaurants, in which they would be sold to customers.
After all that went down, death threats were sent to EVERY SINGLE PERSON in the warehouse. Most of them said things like:
‘WHEN we find out who did this, we will kill you and your family.’
Needless to say, I quit my job and moved.”
He Got Ahead In The Company By Screwing Them Over
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“More seriously, I worked at a giant company as a picker. I discovered that through an easy exploit, I could pick 2-3 items an hour and still hit ‘curve’. Because everyone there is an idiot, they never questioned it and I was eventually promoted.
The position after that had me training hundreds of people in the warehouses. I discovered that my predecessor did nothing at all and didn’t do paperwork for anyone. I made the mistake of telling my boss so the job of fixing 7 years of missing paperwork fell on me. Discovering it was a project destined to fail and hating the company, I made up hundreds of fake paperwork and filed them/entered them into the system.
Again, because where I worked everyone is an idiot, no one noticed for the 3 years I worked at the company despite much of it not making any sense. Some of the names were signed ‘HAHAHA SCREW YOU I HATE THIS PLACE.’ I got further promotions for my ‘productivity’ and did the same thing across multiple facilities.
By my estimate, roughly 30-40% of the company’s Canadian records are obvious BS, yet I was never fired or found out.”
This IT Guy Holds A Trove Of Secrets, Thanks To Computer Memory
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“IT guy here. It’s amazing what people will do on their computers and say in their emails despite having signed a waiver which stated that all computer activity at work is monitored and recorded.
I have half the company’s banking, social media and personal email account info and passwords. I know who is secretly banging who at the office behind their spouse’s backs. I know who is cybering at work and spanking it in the bathroom almost daily. At least, they tell their intimate chat partner they’re running off to the bathroom to spank it, I just haven’t felt the need to check the validity of that one. I know when people are having marital problems, financial problems, I even know one person here had their children taken away because a social worker found ‘snow’ in their house. I know who is embezzling money, I know when people get fired for completely bull reasons (like they just want to replace them with someone younger and nicer on the eyes), and I know who my boss is buying substances from.
Basically, I have a treasure trove of my coworker’s secrets. I won’t actively do anything with this info, but it’s nice knowing I have the ammunition there if something were to ever happen.”
He’s Literally Working Blind With Thousands Of Important Colors
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“I work in Advertising as a 3D Lighter for very high profile clients like Apple, Google, Facebook, etc. My job is to ensure that every bit of Computer Generated Imagery is textured and lit in a way that matches how it would look in real life.
Funny thing is, I’m severely red-green colorblind. The only way I can tell what color something is supposed to be is by sampling a pixel on the screen and reading out the Red Green and Blue values. I’ve nearly memorized the hue numbers from 0-360 and where things fall on the rainbow chart. I’ve had shots come back to my inbox telling me that something that’s supposed to be red looks too brownish green or something that’s supposed to be dark green looks purple. I always say I accidentally had a hue shift on it at render time or make up some funny excuse, like the lighting info from the shoot had a weird tinge to it. I’ve been doing this for seven years now and the only people who know are my girlfriend and best friend and family.”