Nora Ephron wrote about how she'd only told one person her sexual fantasy, her shrink, and she was overjoyed when she saw in the newspaper that he'd died.
Aww man, they deleted their confession. Speaking of fantasies, has anyone read My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday? It's basically a collection of transgressive fantasies of women based on letters and tapes and interviews. I have yet to read it myself.
Hah! I remember you talked about it on the Joe Rogan. How you will never have to worry about mom going in and out of consciousness and seeing her fall and break something. And how you thought it made you a bad person.
And also the thing about your dad, where you found out he died, you were off the hook with that Winona Ryder thing.
I think folks dealing with a very sick parent often feel relief and then tremendous guilt at that feeling. 19 years later and I still occasionally become frozen by the memory.
Spending many years in therapy has left me with very few unspoken confessions, but if I dig deep I may be able to find one I'm willing to share here. I'll come back to this.
Ohhh, that's the pill you were talking about on This is Horror that forces you to stop drinking because the combination will make you very sick. Thank god. Sandwiches are now safe to walk the streets without a wild Chuck eating their meat out.
Chuck's sandwich story really hit home for me. I am a chronic sleep walker and can relate to that feeling of not being in control of yourself. I wake up with scrapes bruises, things in the house misplaced. What the hell was my unconscious self up to?
People have such great Ambien stories. A good friend of mine woke up one morning feeling like shit and thinking she had contracted a horrible stomach flu. She called in sick to work then went downstairs to her kitchen where she found a sink full of empty mini-margarita bottles. It was only then that she realized she wasn't sick -- she was hungover from a party of one she didn't remember having.
I actually was kidnapped. Unfortunately it wasn't by strangers, it was my own father. I was reunited with my mom after spending over a year in another country.
I hate the world. I hate the Universe. I hate everything to an extent that even if I had everything, all pleasures, all revenge and all the riches, even if I became emperor, and could commit every atrocity, even then, I wouldn't feel justified. It's a grudge that I believe I will carry to the grave and beyond.
makes me wonder what previous lives you lived. or what happened in this one. that's quite a burden you are carrying and it must be lightened a little by sharing it here?
It is quite a burden. The problem is that the cause is really a lot of stuff that was being accumulated. But the trigger, the thing that made me snap, was being falsely accused of rape, while having my best friend being actually raped and not wanting to call the police. Nothing happened to me, the woman who accused me had no proofs and I proved that she lied many times. But this broke my heart in a level that I could not imagine. However this is more than two years ago. It hurts less. Tried some therapy three times, but it only made it worse for me and for the therapist who did not know what to say.
Anyway I hung onto this hatred and used it to make me stronger and more aware of how rough can this world be. Sometimes though I get myself into a spiral of rage, but marijuana works most of the time in the hardest times.
In this time I met someone who I deeply fell in love but due to my anxiety (which could be considered a symtom of PTSD) I lost her. Of course this made my anger grow even more. But as much as I feel rage, I don't hate specifically these people, I hate God, I hate whoever made this crap. The only thing that gave me comfort was Albert Camus' The Rebel, where it speaks of existential revolt. This is exactly what I feel.
It is pretty much a revolt against the lack of meaning of this universe. It is the revolt against the feeling that after all everything that we make is meaningless and will disappear. Someone who fully lives this, someone who see the meaninglessness of the universe and still insists to live and make something out of life instead of commiting suicide or choosing to drug him/herself to death is someone who revolts against the absurd.
I've got a warm up confession which is so ick to me lol. As an addict spent every dime of my savings of 45,000 dollars on opiates and heroin. That doesn't include the weekly paychecks.
That's worse than me, though I did spend fifteen thousand in six months, at least. I only know that number because that was how much I had in my savings at the time, so it doesn't include my checking account and all the nights I left work and spent $300, all my tips from the night.
I live witha man, my children's father, he's going through hard time now, having therapy...when I look at him I know that everything is over and I will leave him as soon as he will be better. I don't want suicide on my hands and he is a good father after all. But I might as well destroy him and tell him a truth that I slept with his stepfather when we started dating.
Many years ago while hitchiking from New Mexico to San Francisco I was picked up by a trucker hauling some war machinery I cant recall. The trucker had a tatto of the confederate flag with the word "Cracker" written underneath. Of course, this was something of a red flag but when hitchiking through the desert, beggars cannot always be chosers.
The length of my ride with this trucker consisted of me kindly rejecting his propositions to smoke meth with him and fuck him.
We stopped at a rest stop and I got out to stretch and piss. Upon coming out of the rest area, I saw to my horror the nefarious trucker speeding off and into the sunset with my belongings. I called the cops and we tracked him down. I did retrieve my things and did not press charges in hopes that this incedent may serve as a lesson to him.
Of a long list of odd human intetactions that was by far the most surreal.
Well— here it goes. As a kid, I was so terrified of passing by “Andy Gumps” that lived behind the fruit cellar door in the basement of our old farm house to use the bathroom— that if I had to urinate, I’d either do it in a corner of the bedroom or sit on the ledge of the window and let it out that way.
And now I’m mortified because you all know. Great, let the judgement begin…
My Uncle got a chicken when I was 3-4 or so. Instead of making a coop, he kept it in the dilapidated trailer we lived in. The chicken roosted on top of the little washer/dryer stack in the bathroom that was nearly never used. The chicken terrorized me regularly. Pecking and scratching. Eating my food, et cetera. Peeing wasn't a problem because I always peed outside anyway. But I started holding my poo for as long as possible to avoid going into the bathroom with the chicken, shitting my pants, et cetera. I was lower in the pecking order in my house than a goddamned chicken.
Hah! You make 'Hillbilly Elegy' read like Henry James.
And I was once terrorized by a flock of turkeys. David Foster Wallace writes about being deathly afraid of chickens after one pecked him near the eye as a toddler.
To be fair, my experience is among the poorest and craziest. I watched about 3 minutes of Hillbilly Elegy and couldnt do it. I know too much. Impossible to suspend disbelief. My intuition says that that book is entirely made up, as well as everything else about the author. This place is much, much darker. Well, it can be. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that his family has some sense, but he is still completely full of shit.
I stay in touch with my neighbor from the trailer park because shes pretty much my mom. She loves telling the story of when a rooster pecked me in my ear and drew blood. She asked what we should do about it. Tiny platinum blonde me said "Take a ball bat and kill that basserd." Undoubtedly repeated from my uncle.
I’m right with you about “Hillbilly Elegy.” I too, felt it was so washed of truth and a set up for presidency to win people over. Even Ron Howard is pissed at him because HE knows how much is false. He’s now a representative in my home state. I’m so lucky.
Thank you for sharing that with me. So much bad happened in that old farmhouse I often call the “Shell.” I wish it would burn down. I hate that effing house. I feel like my Mom and Dad are still in there yelling at each other and I’m cowering in a closet.
I had managed to avoid reading Hillbilly Elegy for years until a recent stay in a psych hospital. It was the only book available that wasn't middle grade fantasy. It was one of the worst books I'd read in a long time. So many contradictions in it, it had to be either fake or completely exaggerated.
But your story reminds me of another secret although this one isn't technically mine, it's one that someone shared with me. I was playing with my cousin at the trailer they lived in and I had to go pee. She pulls this soggy shoe box out from under her bed and shows it to me. She didn't like leaving her room to go to the bathroom so she would just pee in this shoe box. I'm two years older so I knew a bit more about how cardboard boxes work. So I went outside and peed in a bush instead.
Mine were the hunting dogs. They were chained up near their dog houses and I was barely able to pick up the 5 gallon bucket with a little water in it when I had to feed and water them. They had a path at the end of their chain where they ran back and forth and I knew when I crossed that line, the dogs were going to tackle me. I am still scared of large aggressive dogs.
When I was 14 years old I drank a whole bottle of whisky in my friend's basement. My parents got back home and started screaming. They found me dead in bed in a bath of puke. The ambulance rushed me to hospital. I went in an ethylic coma for a few hours. When I woke up in the morning I kissed my mum and asked, "How was your evening?" I couldn't remember anything of what happened. And after so many years I still can't.
Nora Ephron wrote about how she'd only told one person her sexual fantasy, her shrink, and she was overjoyed when she saw in the newspaper that he'd died.
Maybe this wasn't such a great idea. There's plenty of less incriminating stuff I've never told anyone. What was I thinking?
She told the shrink the fantasy, or wanted to have sex with the shrink?
She'd told him the fantasy.
Aww man, they deleted their confession. Speaking of fantasies, has anyone read My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday? It's basically a collection of transgressive fantasies of women based on letters and tapes and interviews. I have yet to read it myself.
This book was my earliest sex ed. I hid in my mom’s closet to read it. 🤯
I've read half of this and it's a crazy book. It's laid out as an imaginary brothel for women and each chapter is letters with a similar fantasy theme
That's par for the course on the road to being a non profit executive.
Nice. An excellent answer.
This one took the wind outta me. Too real.
Right? The morning my mother died my grief was tempered (a mite) by the knowledge that I'd only suffer her death once in life.
Hah! I remember you talked about it on the Joe Rogan. How you will never have to worry about mom going in and out of consciousness and seeing her fall and break something. And how you thought it made you a bad person.
And also the thing about your dad, where you found out he died, you were off the hook with that Winona Ryder thing.
I was ashamed to realize I cried more for my cat dying then I did for my grandparents. My grandparents were awesome too.
I think folks dealing with a very sick parent often feel relief and then tremendous guilt at that feeling. 19 years later and I still occasionally become frozen by the memory.
Are we meant to pour out the raw content at this stage? Or are we meant to produce a first draft of a story? Ready to crucify self.
Don't overthink this, Randy. It's a sentence at most.
Yikes, Chuck! There isn't a thing I haven't told my husband. Gimme a little time to think about this.
I second this motion. lol I have to put my thinking cap on.
What did Wilde write in 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'? "A happy marriage makes deception essential."
Hmm. I think I’ve got it. But no one’s gonna like it. lol
Being "liked" is not the point of the exercise. Take your time. I'll move the "reveal" up to Wednesday of this next week.
How could I forget, “you don’t write to make friends.”
Already posted.
As my four-year-old stepson once said: my heart is beeping so fast.
Okay. I'm thinking.
Spending many years in therapy has left me with very few unspoken confessions, but if I dig deep I may be able to find one I'm willing to share here. I'll come back to this.
No hurry.
Got one....
I poisoned my (then) best friend's boyfriend. (Also posting this as a separate comment.)
.reknird gib a ecno saw I
You had to type THAT backwards? But you get the idea.
You were a big brinker?
Were? WERE? Happy to say I'm back on The Pill.
Chuck, I know you're referring to Ambien but my mind wants to go to birth control lol
Antabuse. When you drink your entire digestive tract turns inside out.
Ohhh, that's the pill you were talking about on This is Horror that forces you to stop drinking because the combination will make you very sick. Thank god. Sandwiches are now safe to walk the streets without a wild Chuck eating their meat out.
Chuck's sandwich story really hit home for me. I am a chronic sleep walker and can relate to that feeling of not being in control of yourself. I wake up with scrapes bruises, things in the house misplaced. What the hell was my unconscious self up to?
People have such great Ambien stories. A good friend of mine woke up one morning feeling like shit and thinking she had contracted a horrible stomach flu. She called in sick to work then went downstairs to her kitchen where she found a sink full of empty mini-margarita bottles. It was only then that she realized she wasn't sick -- she was hungover from a party of one she didn't remember having.
I can't believe I'm giggling my ass off over this. Slave to John Barleycorn for years, and no one knew.
As a child I daydreamed about being kidnapped because in my mind, being stolen away by strangers was more peaceful than being at home.
Me too.
Yall have some beautifully devastating lines.
I actually was kidnapped. Unfortunately it wasn't by strangers, it was my own father. I was reunited with my mom after spending over a year in another country.
I was kidnapped by my father too, who was awarded custody a few weeks later.
Same, but it lasted one night, there were five children at that time. We had fish and chips, and played Mouse Trap.
Alright. *sigh*
In my 20’s I used to drink my own urine because I thought it was healthy.
I expected to be ostracized.
Tom did that for a time in the early 90s! It was a popular trend, and I applaud you for the Comment.
Oh I can’t wait to see the reveal.
Atticus, you're safe no matter how much forbidden lemonade you drank. You're okay in my book.
Forbidden lemonade!!!
Bear Grylls has done it, and he is pretty badass. #Survival
I hate the world. I hate the Universe. I hate everything to an extent that even if I had everything, all pleasures, all revenge and all the riches, even if I became emperor, and could commit every atrocity, even then, I wouldn't feel justified. It's a grudge that I believe I will carry to the grave and beyond.
makes me wonder what previous lives you lived. or what happened in this one. that's quite a burden you are carrying and it must be lightened a little by sharing it here?
It is quite a burden. The problem is that the cause is really a lot of stuff that was being accumulated. But the trigger, the thing that made me snap, was being falsely accused of rape, while having my best friend being actually raped and not wanting to call the police. Nothing happened to me, the woman who accused me had no proofs and I proved that she lied many times. But this broke my heart in a level that I could not imagine. However this is more than two years ago. It hurts less. Tried some therapy three times, but it only made it worse for me and for the therapist who did not know what to say.
Anyway I hung onto this hatred and used it to make me stronger and more aware of how rough can this world be. Sometimes though I get myself into a spiral of rage, but marijuana works most of the time in the hardest times.
In this time I met someone who I deeply fell in love but due to my anxiety (which could be considered a symtom of PTSD) I lost her. Of course this made my anger grow even more. But as much as I feel rage, I don't hate specifically these people, I hate God, I hate whoever made this crap. The only thing that gave me comfort was Albert Camus' The Rebel, where it speaks of existential revolt. This is exactly what I feel.
Haven't read The Rebel but read The Stranger many moons ago. Not sure what existential revolt is?
It is pretty much a revolt against the lack of meaning of this universe. It is the revolt against the feeling that after all everything that we make is meaningless and will disappear. Someone who fully lives this, someone who see the meaninglessness of the universe and still insists to live and make something out of life instead of commiting suicide or choosing to drug him/herself to death is someone who revolts against the absurd.
I've got a warm up confession which is so ick to me lol. As an addict spent every dime of my savings of 45,000 dollars on opiates and heroin. That doesn't include the weekly paychecks.
Holy moly that's a lot of money coursing through your bloodstream. Somebody drain Cheap's blood we need that 45K back lol
lolol. It was a lesson learned. I'm doing much better now.
Good
That's worse than me, though I did spend fifteen thousand in six months, at least. I only know that number because that was how much I had in my savings at the time, so it doesn't include my checking account and all the nights I left work and spent $300, all my tips from the night.
Yep. Lolol
Thank God I didnt have access to that much money in those days. I would have died for sure.
I live witha man, my children's father, he's going through hard time now, having therapy...when I look at him I know that everything is over and I will leave him as soon as he will be better. I don't want suicide on my hands and he is a good father after all. But I might as well destroy him and tell him a truth that I slept with his stepfather when we started dating.
!!!!!
Godspeed
Eh, who cares.
Many years ago while hitchiking from New Mexico to San Francisco I was picked up by a trucker hauling some war machinery I cant recall. The trucker had a tatto of the confederate flag with the word "Cracker" written underneath. Of course, this was something of a red flag but when hitchiking through the desert, beggars cannot always be chosers.
The length of my ride with this trucker consisted of me kindly rejecting his propositions to smoke meth with him and fuck him.
We stopped at a rest stop and I got out to stretch and piss. Upon coming out of the rest area, I saw to my horror the nefarious trucker speeding off and into the sunset with my belongings. I called the cops and we tracked him down. I did retrieve my things and did not press charges in hopes that this incedent may serve as a lesson to him.
Of a long list of odd human intetactions that was by far the most surreal.
-Joe DeVita
Well— here it goes. As a kid, I was so terrified of passing by “Andy Gumps” that lived behind the fruit cellar door in the basement of our old farm house to use the bathroom— that if I had to urinate, I’d either do it in a corner of the bedroom or sit on the ledge of the window and let it out that way.
And now I’m mortified because you all know. Great, let the judgement begin…
I've shared a similar story before...
My Uncle got a chicken when I was 3-4 or so. Instead of making a coop, he kept it in the dilapidated trailer we lived in. The chicken roosted on top of the little washer/dryer stack in the bathroom that was nearly never used. The chicken terrorized me regularly. Pecking and scratching. Eating my food, et cetera. Peeing wasn't a problem because I always peed outside anyway. But I started holding my poo for as long as possible to avoid going into the bathroom with the chicken, shitting my pants, et cetera. I was lower in the pecking order in my house than a goddamned chicken.
Hah! You make 'Hillbilly Elegy' read like Henry James.
And I was once terrorized by a flock of turkeys. David Foster Wallace writes about being deathly afraid of chickens after one pecked him near the eye as a toddler.
To be fair, my experience is among the poorest and craziest. I watched about 3 minutes of Hillbilly Elegy and couldnt do it. I know too much. Impossible to suspend disbelief. My intuition says that that book is entirely made up, as well as everything else about the author. This place is much, much darker. Well, it can be. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that his family has some sense, but he is still completely full of shit.
I stay in touch with my neighbor from the trailer park because shes pretty much my mom. She loves telling the story of when a rooster pecked me in my ear and drew blood. She asked what we should do about it. Tiny platinum blonde me said "Take a ball bat and kill that basserd." Undoubtedly repeated from my uncle.
I’m right with you about “Hillbilly Elegy.” I too, felt it was so washed of truth and a set up for presidency to win people over. Even Ron Howard is pissed at him because HE knows how much is false. He’s now a representative in my home state. I’m so lucky.
Thank you for sharing that with me. So much bad happened in that old farmhouse I often call the “Shell.” I wish it would burn down. I hate that effing house. I feel like my Mom and Dad are still in there yelling at each other and I’m cowering in a closet.
Sorry that things were so chaotic. At least we got some good stories out of the deal.
I’m sorry back. I agree. We sure did. And you my friend—- are one helluva writer. I’m glad I had the chance to meet you and hear you read.
I had managed to avoid reading Hillbilly Elegy for years until a recent stay in a psych hospital. It was the only book available that wasn't middle grade fantasy. It was one of the worst books I'd read in a long time. So many contradictions in it, it had to be either fake or completely exaggerated.
But your story reminds me of another secret although this one isn't technically mine, it's one that someone shared with me. I was playing with my cousin at the trailer they lived in and I had to go pee. She pulls this soggy shoe box out from under her bed and shows it to me. She didn't like leaving her room to go to the bathroom so she would just pee in this shoe box. I'm two years older so I knew a bit more about how cardboard boxes work. So I went outside and peed in a bush instead.
I had the same experience with a duck 🦆
Mine were the hunting dogs. They were chained up near their dog houses and I was barely able to pick up the 5 gallon bucket with a little water in it when I had to feed and water them. They had a path at the end of their chain where they ran back and forth and I knew when I crossed that line, the dogs were going to tackle me. I am still scared of large aggressive dogs.
Chained dogs break my heart every time.
When I was 14 years old I drank a whole bottle of whisky in my friend's basement. My parents got back home and started screaming. They found me dead in bed in a bath of puke. The ambulance rushed me to hospital. I went in an ethylic coma for a few hours. When I woke up in the morning I kissed my mum and asked, "How was your evening?" I couldn't remember anything of what happened. And after so many years I still can't.