Posts about guilt and regret

Anonymous 2026/09/29 My dad has been sober for years and everyone celebrates him as this inspirational success story, but I’m still angry at him and I feel guilty because he really did change. He drank through most of my childhood. He missed games, forgot promises, scared us when …

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Anonymous 2026/09/27 I secretly regret becoming a parent, and I would never say that out loud around anyone who knows me. I love my kids. I would protect them with my life. They are funny and smart and they’ve given me moments of happiness I didn’t know existed before them. All of…

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Anonymous 2026/09/22 I think I'm a bad mother, not in the way people say it for reassurance, and I need to say it somewhere that isn't a therapist's office. My daughter is nine. She is a difficult kid. Diagnosed, medicated, in OT twice a week, the whole apparatus. And I love her a…

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Anonymous 2026/09/29 I had an abortion years ago and never told the man I was dating at the time, and recently I found out he’s struggling with infertility with his wife. I haven’t spoken to him in years. We weren’t married, the relationship was unstable, and when I got pregnant I…

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Anonymous 2026/09/27 My wife had an affair seven years ago and I stayed, but sometimes I think staying changed me into someone I don’t like. We did all the things people tell you to do. Marriage counseling, transparency, passwords, long conversations, boundaries, accountability. S…

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Anonymous 2026/09/23 I'm a public defender with a hundred and eighty open cases and I want to describe what that number actually does. Eight years in this office. I have a master's-level salary and law school debt that will outlive the debt itself. A hundred and eighty cases means…

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Anonymous 2026/09/29 I realized during therapy that I don’t actually like my mother, and that realization has made me feel worse than almost anything else I’ve uncovered. I love her. If she were sick I’d be there immediately. If she needed money I’d help. I call her, visit, make s…

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Anonymous 2026/09/29 I’m afraid my husband is becoming like his father and I don’t know if it’s fair to judge somebody based on patterns they haven’t fully repeated yet. His father was controlling with money, dismissive of his wife, and the kind of man who thought paying the bills…

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Anonymous 2026/09/27 The thing I can't say at a dinner party is that the best teaching job I have ever had is inside a prison. Before this I was in a public high school for eleven years. I left in 2016 after a year I don't want to describe in detail — it involved an administration…

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Anonymous 2026/09/28 I found out my best friend of nineteen years told my husband about my abortion, and I don't know who I'm more angry at, and I've been sitting with that for two weeks. Context: it was before I met him. I was twenty-three. I have never told him, not because I'm …

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Anonymous 2026/09/22 I have tinnitus. Six years. I want to write about it properly, because everything I found was either a medical pamphlet or someone in crisis, and I'm neither. Forty-one. It started in October 2019 after one concert, which is embarrassingly on-the-nose. Not eve…

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Anonymous 2026/10/10 My son stopped speaking to me in 2021 and he still texts my wife on her birthday, and I have come to understand that this is not an accident. He's thirty-one. We have a daughter too, twenty-seven, who talks to both of us and who has made it clear she will not …

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Anonymous 2026/09/29 I let everyone at work think I grew up somewhere I didn't, and I've been doing it for eleven years. I'm from a town in eastern Kentucky of about twelve hundred people. My father worked at a mine until 2004 and then didn't work. We were on assistance for a stre…

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wax 2026/09/28 I can speak without regrets ; and even if you perceive that as fear, at least I am not silent.

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Anonymous 2026/09/24 Sometimes I miss a person who treated me badly, and I feel ashamed of missing them. Not the way they treated me. Just the way the room felt when they were in a good mood. I know exactly how that sounds. I still catch myself checking if they are online.

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Anonymous 2026/10/07 I want to ask something practical, because I've been going in circles for a year and the internet is useless on this. How do you actually go no-contact with a parent who isn't a monster? My father is not abusive. I need to say that first because every resource…

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Anonymous 2026/09/29 I secretly read my teenage daughter’s private journal and found out she hates me. I wasn’t snooping because I was curious. At least that’s what I tell myself. She had been withdrawn, skipping meals, snapping at everyone, and I was worried. I went into her room…

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