#1
A few years in, I realized that the theoretical basis for my management style was a For Dummies book on dogs that I'd read as a teenager. It wasn't a bad thing; the basic ideas proposed were that praise and rewards are good while punishment tends to provoke anxiety without improving behaviour. These match modern management beliefs precisely.
But I can not tell anyone that.
#2
#3
The average person holds onto 13 secrets, five of which they’ve never told a living soul.
These findings were revealed in a paper published in 2017, which analyzed more than 13,000 secrets across 10 different studies. Researchers presented participants with 38 common categories of secrets and asked which ones they were actively keeping.
The data revealed that the most common secrets people refuse to share with anyone include outright lies, extramarital thoughts, romantic desire, unconventional quirks, ambitions, mental health challenges, and financial struggles.
#4
I'm pretty certain my mother has no idea and I can't ask her. If she does know she obviously doesn't want me to know and if she doesn't I don't want to be the one to break it to her. I can't tell or ask any of my family members for the same reason. There is one person still living who I think would most likely know but I can't do it.
My grandad was an incredible man. He must have known my mother wasn't his child but when he was widowed aged 35 (my mother was 10 😢) he raised her alone and never looked at another woman. He fought in WWII but refused to speak about it beyond which countries he went to. He worked hard and everything he did was for his family. He passed in 2013 aged 92.
#5
In hindsight, I really should have called animal control or something, I guess it just never crossed my mind at the time. But I felt awful and wanted to honor the little guy the best I could, and that’s what I came up with. I still think about it today, and I get really tense when I see an animal anywhere near a road.
#6
As I was setting up for it, she told me that it was her birthday yesterday, and no one came to see her. She told me that she just wanted someone to come take care of everything for her. I told her that I was really proud of her for making it this far, that I hoped to make it as far as she did.
Eventually she started dozing off as I do my exam, so I tried to be as quiet as I could while putting everything away and getting her back in order. Her blankets had pooled around her waist, so I tried to cover up so that she wouldn't wake up cold, but I accidentally woke her up. I apologized and asked if I had hurt her painful shoulder. She just looked at me, really looked at me, and said no, she had just never really had someone to cover her up like that. I told her to go back to sleep. She did, I dimmed her lights, moved on.
I found out the next day that she didn't live through the night.
I can't tell anyone because that's super sad.
Our secrets can seriously weigh us down, but according to experts, the real damage doesn’t come from the effort it takes to lie or hide the truth in conversation.
The true mental burden comes from mind-wandering — when you are completely alone, your brain constantly drifts back to that secret on a loop. Keeping a part of your inner world locked away can get quite lonely and isolating.
“The problem with having a secret is not concealment. It’s that you have to think about it, you have to live with it. Even when you don’t have to hide it, it can hurt you,” says Michael Slepian, assistant professor at Columbia Business School, whose research is focused on secrecy and trust.
#7
I didn't tell her it was actually my doing.
Ultimately, turned out it was both of us.
#8
Anyway, she passed and I took her recipe book.
#9
Scientists have found that bottling things up can actually distort your reality. Some people feel physically heavier when burdened with a secret, which can literally skew how they navigate their physical surroundings.
“We found that when people were thinking about their secrets, they actually acted as if they were burdened by physical weight. It seems to have this powerful effect even when they’re not hiding a secret in the moment,” says Slepian.
#11
A few days later something in the fridge broke and it made sounds just like he did and I lost it and nobody knows why.
#12
We keep secrets mostly to protect our relationships and our reputation. Research shows that fear of judgment drives most of our silence. We hide financial stress, past mistakes, or taboo habits because we don’t want to deal with family drama, rejection, or hurting the people we love.
But it’s also about control. Studies show that keeping a secret is a way to set personal boundaries. It lets us process big life changes, money issues, or private anxieties on our own terms. We stay quiet simply because we want to control our own story before the rest of the world weighs in.
#14
I will never tell my family about that.
#15
My dad (now passed away) and my two brothers know I was there and turned off the machines keeping her alive but I never told them that despite being her brain being gone her body fought desperately to stay alive and she thrashed and gasped for the last few minutes of her life.
They think she just slipped away peacefully and I think I'll keep it that way.
Telling a close friend or a family member a secret is also a massive gamble. Research shows that people actually spill about 26% of the secrets directly confided in them.
This usually happens if your secret crosses a moral line for them. If a friend feels your secret is wrong or hurtful, their loyalty shifts from protecting you to venting their own shock. This can leave people exposed to major social fallout or judgment.
“People are more likely to reveal other people’s secrets that they think are immoral because it satisfies a (perhaps unconscious) emotional need to see that person punished for the morally outraging secret behavior,” says Jessica Salerno, an associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University.
#16
I hated little dogs. Hated them. Could not stand them at all.
This little guy grew on me. He wasn’t really yappy, he would snuggle with me all the time for my body heat, and he just refused to let me not like him.
He unfortunately was ended by another dog, not the two that I mentioned above, and it was a genuinely gut wrenching loss. It took me a long time to get over the dog, and I still miss him.
The morning he passed, I woke up and he was snuggled in behind my legs. When I left for work I wrapped him up in the blankets that I was just using and kissed him on his little head and told him he was a good boy.
That random moment gave me a ridiculous amount of peace in the moments where it was very tough to deal with the grief of losing him.
I can’t ever tell my wife that I had that moment as my last with his, because she openly talks about how sad she is that she can’t remember the last moment she had with him.
#17
This was until I got diagnosed with a brain tumor (frontal lobe) and had a successful brain surgery. The second I woke up from surgery it was like the impulse to purge was just completely gone. The voice in the back of my head constantly telling me to throw up every single thing I ate just never came back. I just know that the brain tumor must have caused the eating disorder but I'm way too unwilling to confess that I had in the first place to ever actually ask about it.
#18
The risk of real-life backlash is exactly why people turn to the internet. Sharing their deepest baggage with millions of random strangers on Reddit gives them the relief of getting it off their chest with zero real-world consequences.
Strangers online can’t ruin your relationships, get you fired, or judge your family dynamics. The void of the internet then feels way safer than your own best friend
#19
It was me. I’ll never confess.
#20
He already felt bad enough getting it stuck and forcing us to be in the rain trying to get him free, no need to add the fact that my back is now permanently messed up because of it.
He passed never knowing this.
For those asking...It was a whole ordeal.
He got his manual wheelchair stuck trying to get from the car to the covered deck approximately 20 feet away where his motorized chair was waiting to take him the rest of the way into the house.
While we were out that day, a summer thunderstorm came up and we ended up with 2 inches of mud in the gravel driveway by the time we got home. (I did not own the house and had no say in the driveway.) He became stuck in the mud and we spent 30 minutes trying to get him unstuck before we had to call the local rescue squad for help as he was unable to walk more than a few steps at the time, I couldn't help any longer and my partner was even less equipped to help than I was.
Despite trying to only lift with my legs while another person was trying to wedge a piece of carpet under one wheel at a time to get him unstuck, it really doesn't matter when everything suddenly shifts and you're unexpectedly holding onto all that weight by yourself to keep him from sliding sideways (or falling over, it was a toss up between the two) down a short incline and your back says "Nope. I'm out."
I'm doing okay, waiting on surgery and have become a master at saying "I'm done. I'm going to go lie down now." when my back says I've been on my feet long enough for one day.
This drive for digital anonymity makes perfect sense when you look at how destructive keeping quiet can be.
Bottling things up is psychologically costly and associated with a host of negative consequences.
A recent study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that hiding secrets triggers a constant state of low-level emotional stress, which frequently leads to anxiety, burnout, and even physical exhaustion.
Sharing it finally breaks that painful loop, lowering your heart rate and making you feel relieved.