People Share The One Secret They Will Never Let Their Loved Ones Discover

These people share the one secret they have that they can never let out.

Nobody Knew Why She Was Crying

“My mother was really sick in 2008. I was turning 25 and had a younger brother and sister. I lost both of my grandparents on my mom’s side to cancer a few years prior. Mom had to watch as her parents slowly passed away. It destroyed her not having her mother around because they were very close.

My mom was in and out of the hospital for six months from the summer to the fall that year; there were a couple instances where her blood was septic. She recovered, but the doctors continued to run tests on her. One day I stopped by the hospital to check on her; the doctor was in the room when I walked in. He told her she had cancer, and chemo had a chance to save her, but it would mean she would be dealing with it for the unforeseen future.

My mom told me she wasn’t going to do any treatment. She said that no matter what, she was going to be home for the holidays and that I couldn’t tell anyone what the doctor said.

I never told anyone. She left the hospital like it was any other day. Thanksgiving came and she gave a speech before the meal about how she loved everyone, and she began to cry. I knew why, but everyone else just thought it was that she felt blessed.

Shortly after Christmas, she passed. She got her last wish to spend the holidays with the family. After she passed, the doctor told everyone cancer was the cause of death. I never said a word to anyone then and haven’t to this day.”

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“It Would Break My Dad’s Heart”

“My second abortion. They know that when I was assaulted and had to take HIV post-exposure medications, I found out I was pregnant. I started to miscarry, but it was incomplete; had to have a medical abortion to finish it.

I’ll never tell them that not too long after that my wonderful boyfriend put holes in his rubbers to get me pregnant so I wouldn’t leave him (I wasn’t planning to leave him, but it turns out he’s very insecure). I’m still recovering from some physical damage from the assault, not to mention the emotional damage, and couldn’t keep food or water down because of nausea. It was too risky to continue with the pregnancy, and I’m hundreds of miles away from my family with no opportunity to move closer to them, so I had the procedure. It would break my dad’s heart to think of the guilt, pain, and shame I’ve been through so soon after everything else.”

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He Blamed His Brother To Save Himself

“I was six years old and considered myself a baller. My little brother was about three years old, and we had this awesome treehouse in the backyard. It was about 15 feet off the ground, so for a first grader, this thing was MASSIVE.

Anyways, one afternoon we were playing up on it when I decided it would be fun to jump from the top and land on the ground. I did a couple trial runs, jumping from halfway up the ladder and three-fourths of the way up. Both of these jumps were fine and impressed my brother.

Then I got cocky and jumped all the way up from the house part. Bad idea. I broke two bones in my right foot and ankle. My parents were pretty strict, and even at six years old, I knew that telling them I jumped myself was not going to end well for me. So in the 30 seconds or so until my screams roused them from the porch to see what was going on, I decided to say my younger brother inadvertently pushed me from the tree house.

And they bought it. I’m 20 now and in April it will be 14 years since I’ve kept this lie up. My family still jokes about the time that my brother pushed me from the tree house. I’ll never tell.”

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“I Feel So Lonely”

“I’m depressed and have thought about taking my life many times. I don’t dare mention it to my family because they’ll overreact, and I can’t take my life because I’m afraid my parents, siblings, spouse, and my little toddler would somehow blame themselves.

I think my sisters know something is wrong with me because I’m always at home. They try so hard to encourage me to go out with them when they have spare time. Sometimes I feel like if I stay here and live for more than 20 years I’ll just end being a burden to everyone around me. Sometimes I think I might have a mental illness besides depression and anxiety.

I just don’t know what to do anymore. I can’t keep a job due to me just breaking down and quitting, I don’t have any friends to spend time with or even talk about anything. I feel so lonely. I hate knowing that I was seen as a kid with a good future ahead of me and my family having such high hopes of me becoming a successful person of some kind, and now I’m just an awkward stay-at-home mom with just a high school diploma and crappy job experience in janitorial services, with no hope for the future.

I hope I die some sort of accident or some natural causes because I don’t want to be here anymore facing the unknown. Life sucks, but I guess this is nothing compared to a lot of other things people have experienced, so I really shouldn’t be complaining.”

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She Can’t Say Anything

“In 2002, I was assaulted by a friend/acquaintance. I pressed charges and saw the whole thing through with zero support from family or my boyfriend, by my own choice. I was stupid and thought that if everyone found out I had been drinking during the assault, that it would just be my fault.

Eight years later, my older brother and his long-time girlfriend get pregnant and now we have family obligations with her family around town. The man who assaulted me is her first cousin, raised like brothers and sisters with her and her family. We saw each other at a family function once, six years after the incident, and I haven’t seen him since. He still shows up on her Facebook, commenting and such. I have to pretend like it never happened, though.

For some reason, that burden is on me. My mom and one of my brothers know about it, but that’s it. And my sister-in-law is weird and crazy about offenders. She tracks them all through her neighborhood and worries about her three daughters, but their uncle has a history of assaulting girls. I wasn’t the only one, and before me, there were two girls who were 14 or 15 and he assaulted them when he was 23. He was at least 28 when he assaulted me, although I don’t know for sure. Those other girls who were assaulted came to my trial. They were there and they watched him get a light sentence.

But I can’t tell anyone else about it at this point without risking my brother losing his daughters or his other family. So I just keep my mouth shut and hope he doesn’t surface at a family party.”

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A Little ‘Pet Sematary’

“When I was in early high school, our family cat died. She was about 16 years old. I wanted to bury her in a remote area of the backyard where she had spent so much time, but my dad insisted that our cat’s remains be placed in the trash and taken away.

When he wasn’t looking, I removed her corpse from where he had placed it in the trash and dug a grave far out of sight, but still on our property. I even made a small marker. It felt like the right thing to do, even if Dad thought otherwise. They never knew that we had our own little pet cemetery.”

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Everybody Loved Her, But She Had A Dark Secret

“Everyone loved my great aunt. She was a great woman with a big heart. An honest Christian woman, an absolute saint of a nurse who would sacrifice anything for friends and family.

She also abused me for well over a year when she came to live with us when I was nine years old. She told me great stories of how I would be disowned and sent to an orphanage or go down under for ‘my actions.’ I will never tell my family about her actions nor that I unplugged her oxygen tank one night.

One of my uncles claimed this happened to him as well when he was younger and everybody excommunicated him. I would’ve confided in him as well, but he killed himself before I had the courage to do it.”

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Nobody Knows How He Died

“No one knows that my oldest son died in prison and not in a hunting accident. He made a mistake that got him sent to prison and he committed suicide. However, the majority of my family is Mormon and looks down on that. I basically copied how King Baratheon died in ‘Game Of Thrones’ when I told them what happened.

There’s no sense in them looking down on him for things that they have no business knowing. The only person who knows is his stepmother because we had to pay for an attorney to try and keep him out of lockup.”

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She Will Never Say What She Did

“When I was 18, my mother passed away from cancer. For many years before her death, she was helping my sister financially and essentially giving her a credit card and access to savings for ‘when she was in need,’ a privilege she abused into oblivion. My sister ultimately left my father with a gross amount of debt when my mother finally passed.

Weeks before my mother died, she asked me to fetch her purse. She handed me a stack of receipts and other papers stuffed into a small paper bag she had nearby and told me to burn it, and never let my father know what I had done because it’d just make him even angrier.

I burned it. Nobody in my family knows, least of all my father. I never looked too closely at what was in there, but I always was curious what my father would have done if he had access to it.

It makes no difference now, though, my mom and my sister are both long gone (my sister died shortly after my mom), and my dad has retired decently after spending the better part of a decade since my mom’s death paying off the debts accrued by her and my sister.

I don’t know who I should curse more. It’s complicated, and I don’t like to think about it much anymore. All that being said, I will never, ever, ever tell anyone in my immediate family what my mother asked me to do that day.”

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He Can’t Open Up About This To Anyone

“No one knows that my first girlfriend was intimately abusive towards me. She was 15 and I was 16 at the time. I’m now 25.

After we started an intimate relationship, she became possessive and controlling; she wanted to fool around all the time. When I wasn’t particularly in the mood or was busy, she’d threaten to hurt herself. It worked most of the time. After some time, she figured by threatening to hurt me instead of herself she’d get intimacy more, and she was right. The handful of times I resisted, she’d take out a blunt object or knife and hurt me.

I have a few scars on my arms and back from being knifed. Thankfully, no burns remain. It’s something I’ll likely not tell anyone. Maybe my future wife will be the first person to know, but even then it’s going to take a lot of time to open up about this.

My mother sometimes asks me why I don’t have a girlfriend, and this would be the reason. I’m scared of women. Not ‘boo’ scared, just an extreme anxiety and feelings of discomfort around women. I’m still attracted to women, but I resist the moves of others and don’t make moves myself because there’s always a lingering thought of, ‘why would I potentially put myself in that position again?’ I’ve become better, just still apprehensive about relationships.”

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She Carries So Much Guilt

“A horrific high school relationship resulted in a pregnancy. I was ill at the time and wasn’t aware I was pregnant. I had an incomplete stillbirth at around 20 weeks. I was away at university and never told my family.

The second-trimester miscarriage resulted in awful uterine scarring/Asherman’s syndrome. The chances of me carrying a child to term are minimal. My late husband and current husband are the only people I’ve told.

The baby was a girl and I named her. I feel guilty, because even though it so wasn’t the right time to get pregnant, maybe if I had known, it would have resulted in a healthy pregnancy. That may have been my one chance to have a child.”

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She’s Still Struggling With This

“My cousins were two and four years older than me. They assaulted me from the time I was four years old to nine years old. I’m only unsure about the time frame because I’ve subconsciously blocked a lot of memories. We had sleepovers every weekend for that time period. Encounters happened almost every time.

I idolized these two family members. They told me not to tell anyone, so I didn’t. This has caused a lot of turmoil for me because I don’t know how to let anyone get close to me because I’ve always been conditioned to keep people at a distance and over-analyze. I can’t let anyone in my family know because these two have become high-ish ranking and respected members of our military. They are definitely respected in my family.

This all has caused my issues with substance abuse, issues with eating disorders, various mental disorders, God knows.

I’m just coming to terms with all this.”

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She Never Told A Soul

“I was assaulted in college. It was the early ’90s, and I was completely wasted. I hid it from everyone, including my boyfriend who brought me for the abortion I needed following the assault. He assumed that one of our rubbers broke or I got pregnant when we were ‘pre-gaming’ putting the rubber on. Maybe I did. I will never know.

In my heart, though, I know it was the terrible frat boy who took advantage of a passed out 18-year-old. I still feel partially responsible for it; I was so stupid for getting wasted like that. But no one deserves to be assaulted. Forget you, Sig Ep frat dude.”

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“It’s A Source Of Shame To This Day”

“I had a plan to kill myself. I knew how and when. What stopped me was that I didn’t know what would happen tomorrow.

It wasn’t my family, it wasn’t hoping for a better life or anything meaningful. It was the simple question of what would happen the next day. It’s a source of shame to this day.”

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“It Would Crush Them”

“I lied and told everyone that I graduated college. I got a fake diploma and a nice diploma frame. Faked some transcripts. Even forged a letter from the administration congratulating me. I bought a graduation cap and gown and just as I was on my way to the graduation ceremony (which would not be naming me to walk) I got in a car accident on purpose just to cover my massive lie.

My parents were disappointed that they did not see me walk, but it was far better than the disappointment of them finding out that I’ve been lying to them for so long about going to school and graduating.

I own a mobile development firm and we just hit $1 million in revenue this past October, and I help pay for my grandparent’s caretaker (he’s 90 years old and living by himself) and have to subsidize my brother’s rent otherwise he would be homeless. My parents are divorced as well.

It would absolutely crush them. But I do it to keep them happy and my family in one piece.”

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The Love Is A Lie

“The boyfriend that my family loves so dearly is actually just someone I’ve been in a friends-with-benefits relationship with over the years. Both of us are focused on our own careers and are the types that would probably do best in life without a significant other. We dated at first and mutually ended it due to a lack of commitment from both of us, and decided to go the friends-with-benefits route. Although, his benefit is the physical acts, while mine is a financial benefit.

When both our parents come to town, they ask for him and me to meet them for dinner and spend time talking about ‘our future.’ We both agree it would be best to pretend we are together since it helps us cater to all the life events happening like weddings and holiday festivities.

We’re never breaking up.”

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She Thought The Abuse Was Normal

“My older brother assaulted me from when I was eight to about 10 years old. It’s hard for me to think about that time or about him. He hated me and tried to kill me on a few occasions, but I just thought that was part of the regular ‘sibling rivalry.’ I didn’t realize anything way atypical until a friend talked about the sweet birthday gift her sister bought for her. I thought, ‘Wait, your sister doesn’t hate you?’

But what I don’t want anyone to know is that when I told my parents that my brother was ‘bothering’ me, they told me to just keep to myself and avoid anything that would provoke him. That advice has shaped my life, and not for the better.”

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“We Never Spoke Of It Again”

“I was around 12 years old and my brother was about 16. We had some fireworks that we were shooting around. We thought it would be funny to shoot one into the neighbor’s backyard. Haha, we laugh and go back inside.

I don’t remember how much time passed, but after a while, the whole house was in flames. They ended up having to move out — don’t know where they ended up. The upstairs in our house smelled like smoke for a long time, probably months, but I can’t remember exactly.

The police even came over and talked to my brother, and I recall sitting on the stairs listening to the police talking to him and my parents in the kitchen. He flat out denied everything, and that was the end of it. We never spoke of it again and got away with it.”

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She Made Her Mom Suffer

“When I was 20 years old, my mom died of stomach cancer. It was terrible. She couldn’t eat and basically wasted away. I coped by adhering to a heavy illegal substance regiment. Substances, drinks, pain patches, and Ativan.

I loved Ativan. When you sign up for hospice care they give you a med pack to place under the bed filled with various medications, including, you guessed it, Ativan. I couldn’t help myself. As far as I knew, Ativan was just an anti-anxiety medication. I’d sneak into her med pack each day while she slept and pinch a dropper full.

Her final hours were plagued by uncontrolled seizures. We knew it would be bad, but not this bad. The hospice nurse on the phone told us to squeeze several droppers full of Ativan under my mom’s tongue to help quell the seizures.

My stomach sank. I thought it was just for anxiety. My grandma, a retired nurse, managed to get about half a teaspoon under my mom’s tongue until the vile ran dry. My mom spent her final hours in a perpetually seized state, gasping for air and in incredible pain. All because I needed a fix.”

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