The Confessions

"I feel a complicated relief when people I once envied go through difficult times. I recognise it immediately and I am ashamed of it immediately. But it is there. I think it is the shadow side of comparison and I have not yet worked out how to stop comparing."

"When my colleague got the promotion I had been working towards I felt genuinely pleased when their first major project struggled. I did not want them to fail. But some part of me was relieved that it was hard for them. I am not proud of that part."

"I have judged people silently and harshly for things I have since done myself. The hypocrisy is not lost on me. I am trying to be slower to judge now. But the memory of my earlier certainty about other people is its own source of shame."

"I sometimes find it hard to be genuinely happy for people I care about when good things happen to them. I feel the happiness but underneath it there is something smaller and meaner that I have to consciously suppress. I have never told anyone this."

"I have had thoughts about people I love that I would never in a million years act on but that frightened me with their vividness. I understand now that thoughts are not intentions. But for a long time I believed having the thought made me monstrous."

"I am sometimes relieved when social plans are cancelled. Not occasionally. Often. I have built a social life that looks full from the outside. Inside I am frequently exhausted by it and quietly delighted when circumstances remove the obligation. I do not know if this makes me introverted or just dishonest."

"I have wished, in dark moments, that certain people from my past would encounter difficulty. Not harm. Just difficulty. Enough to understand something of what they made me feel. I am not proud of the arithmetic of that."

"I have fantasised about walking away from my entire life. Not from the people in it. Just from the version of myself I have built and the obligations I have accumulated. Starting somewhere new as someone slightly different. I would never do it. But the thought visits regularly."

"There have been times in my life when I have not wanted to be here anymore. I have never acted on it and I am glad. I have never told anyone. I wonder sometimes if telling someone would make it lighter or heavier. Writing this is the closest I have come."

"I have caught myself hoping, briefly, that something would go wrong for people who seem to have everything. Not seriously. Not with any real wish for harm. But the flicker of it is there sometimes and I do not like what it says about me."