Inspired by
PostSecret, we asked members to mail us their secrets. As promised, the collected underground thoughts of LEP members, sad and scary and sublime, can be found in their original form.
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"I'm having an affair with a married man. I know it's not good, it's not something I have ever done before. I didn't ever expect I would be in this situation. I'm also friends with his wife, we do quite a lot together, probably really one of my best friends. But the worst thing is, I don't feel guilty. She's cheated on him before, while I've been there sometimes, she slags him off to others, always moaning about him etc. I know it's not an excuse to be doing it, I know it's wrong, but we don't want to stop. The only reason he's still with her is cause of the kids. He says they're just two people living in a house together looking after the kids. He thinks she'd try and turn the kids against him if he left, I agree with him. Maybe one day..." |
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"I am in love with a man I've never met and am only staying with my husband for the sake of the kids." |
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"My work environment is volatile. I am severely depressed because of it. I feel so alone. I wish I had someone to talk to." |
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"My mother has never loved me. She told me at 16 years old that had she known she was having a girl, she would have aborted me. She disowned me officially last year. I was 40." |
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"My mother was psychologically abusive and to this day no one knows except my partner and the counselor I had. My family refuse to accept it, even if only as my truth, and they bury their heads in the sand. My siblings had a different experience- they had strong friendship groups to provide some difference. Perhaps that is why she actively isolated me? To this day, decades later, I still feel the pain of that isolation regularly as fresh as the day it began and the next and the next as it was seared into me how useless and worthless I am. It has dogged every step of my life and every challenge I have faced. I have never had any sense of belonging, support or felt part of a family from which to approach life, and I wonder daily if I will ever feel loved or accepted before I die. Perhaps I am too broken now to ever come back. I get angry, but mostly at myself for letting it all happen to me... but then that's to be expected when everything was always my fault and no one told me any different until two years ago. I've carried this a long time, and every time I try to heal it shreds me again. Now folks are bored of the person who can't get over it, who can't just get on with life and so I choke it all down again because it is, I am, inconvenient and I don't want to be alone again. I can't stand to see the disgust on their faces." |
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"It wasn't my father than found your cocaine. It was me. I'm so sorry." |
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"People think I'm so happy-go-lucky- funny and relentlessly positive. But it's often carefully constructed to hide crushing depression. The days when I'm funniest are the days I'm most likely to be abstractly thinking about just dying already." |