The Confessions

"I never said I love you back to someone who said it to me because I panicked. They laughed it off. We never spoke of it again. We are friends still. But something shifted that day and I think we both know it."

"I never told my father I was proud of him. He worked himself to exhaustion for our family and I took it completely for granted. He passed away three years ago. I have said the words out loud to an empty room since then. It is not the same."

"I have never told a single person about the worst thing I have ever done. I have confessed adjacent things. Carried it in different shapes. But the actual thing, the real weight of it, has never been spoken. Writing even this much feels like something."

"I never congratulated a colleague who got something they had worked incredibly hard for because I was too consumed by my own disappointment at not getting it myself. I sent a brief email. It was cold. They deserved warmth and I could not find it that day."

"I never apologised to a boy I was unkind to at school. Not severely. But consistently enough that I know it affected him. I have seen him once since, as adults. I recognised him immediately. He may not have recognised me. I walked past without stopping."

"I have never told my mother that the year she remarried was the hardest year of my childhood. She was so happy and I did not want to take that from her. I am forty three now. That year still lives in me and she has no idea."

"I have never told my children I struggled with their early years. That the relentlessness of it nearly broke me. They are teenagers and I present as a parent who found it natural and joyful. I did find joy. I also found despair. They should probably know both are possible."

"I never said thank you to a stranger who helped me during the worst week of my life. They sat with me for two hours in a hospital waiting room. I do not know their name. I have no way to find them. But I think about them and wish they knew what those two hours meant."

"I never told my therapist the real reason I started seeing them. I told a version that was true but not the whole truth. We worked for two years on the presenting issue. The real one I have never said to anyone."

"I never told my best friend from school how much she meant to me. We drifted after university as people do. I heard last year she had been seriously ill. I wanted to reach out and could not find the right words. I still have not found them."