What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?

Yes similar… was at uni, I had a boyfriend and I was seeing someone else after getting to know him on a geog field trip . Slept with him and then a few hours later my boyfriend. Over twenty years later I have no regrets. What a time that was.

@theworldisadarkplace My parent waited until I got back to their deathbed to die. However, my sibling waited until I had left for the night to die. So did my closest friend. I have heard many times of dying people seeming to want to spend time with their loved ones while they are present, and preferring to die when they have left. Often it is staff or a chaplain with them, sometimes nobody, but dying alone is a thing.
(edited to add: other parent died when everybody but one daughter had left the room)

A little thing I can admit to, and I find amusing, is to do with my husband on garden leave.
He had been informed he was on a verbal warning for refusing to do work which was both illegal and could have resulted in maiming, injury or deaths. (Think safety switches in a factory being removed - that kind of thing) He hadn’t had the appropriate training and was given a piece very different from the part he was asked to replace, refused to do it without the appropriate training or the directors signature on the work, meaning that if anything happened my husband would be liable for any jail time.
Naturally my husband refused and was given a verbal warning over the weekend. He fought it with his union rep on the Monday and got it removed. However, by the Tuesday, it was back and had been advanced to a written warning (although we never saw it) for insubordination.
Husband was seriously stressed, we have a new baby; he’s being told to do stuff he cannot do and commit to more hours and garden leave became his only proper option.
He found another job within 2 days, jumped ship and the day he left, I mailed a bag of elephant poo to the Managing Director.
We still know people who work there, apparently every year they hear about the MD getting something else from the random corporate client, opening at his desk and getting glitter bombed, covered in grass cuttings or getting a big bag of dicks to eat. One year I emailed him and sent a video of a cockroach with his name on being fed to a snake at a zoo. I send a different package every year on his birthday. This year will be a singing card that doesn’t stop even in water and if it’s ripped open…glitter and still singing. I’m asking for it to play “no more fucks to give” because he really hates swearing!
And no, he won’t recognise me from this post because he did this shit to so many employees!!

I had a difficult childhood so I began stealing at a young age. People could also be very nasty to me so as a defence I always pushed to see how much worse ai could be back to them. Would always say things and lose friends..Just overall not a nice person and I have to live with that now that some people just think I'm nasty, but really deep down I'm not - I was just a lost and lonely kid.

I wish I treated my dog better.

I agree. I think if the general public knew and understood the true scale of the corruption in local government, there would be outcry.

However, I think the problem is so bad that it can’t and won’t go on forever - a reckoning is coming. So I think that particular poster may be being a bit delusional about her daughter having a job for life and might have done better to help her get some marketable AI-proof skills.

I am the worlds worst girlfriend literally

really really REALLY not your fault

I think i over promise as a people pleaser then can act a bit like a dick when over extended so have done some crap things

Not sure where I'm going with this but this sin is very mild compared to what local authorities get up to - they are totally corrupt and are meant to be; Private Eye's Rotten Boroughs deals with this. The smug tone of the confession grates, but some like social workers and safeguarding heads in local councils have a job for life anyway, and in Surrey they certainly don't deserve it. Training someone up for a job at the expense of others is not vastly different to promoting internally and putting out an ad for form's sake.

Yes, I’m afraid so. I’ve done many things I’m not proud of, and if I’m having a bad day I will think about them and what a terrible person I am. On other days I accept I can’t change the past, and just try to tell myself that I have now learned not to behave in that way.

If we were truly bad people, we wouldn’t feel so awful about our past misdeeds!

Not especially, no. I went to a pretty rough school, endured my share of bullying from the gobby toughnuts who liked to intimidate the kids they saw as nerds or snobs. And when I was in my late teens I worked in a very ..er... 'lively' pub which i think left me with a bit of PTSD from some of the things I saw.

So I've witnessed a fair few fights in my time, but never been in one. The closest I got was when a girl in the year above took a dislike to me. She was big and mean and ugly and had a bad rep. She liked a boy who liked me, so that made me a target.

She came up behind me one time at the youth club and grabbed hold of my hair and yanked my head back really hard, clearly trying to start a fight. I was absolutely terrified but I just turned and looked at her like she was a bit strange and pitiful, and carried on what I was doing. If I'd reacted it would have ended in a fight and I'd have certainly got pummelled.

As it was, she just trotted out one of those stock in trade insults of the deeply inadequate bully; something along the lines of 'you fucking snob, you think your shit don't stink' or 'you are so fake, you think you are better than everyone else' or something in that vein, then just walked off. Perhaps I gave off an air of having more confidence than I actually felt. I don't know. The truth is I just didn't know how to fight and no part of me was going to indulge her. If I was going to be beaten up, then so be it.

Weirdly, she completely left me alone after that. She would always look me up and down and whisper with her little gang of hangers-on, but she never actually came near me again.

None of my friends ever had a fight as far as I can remember. I think you are either the sort of person who never has a fight, or the sort who frequently does.

Am I a good person? I dont think it's for me to say but I try to do the right thing most of the time. I never intentionally hurt anyone but can sometimes have a lack of insight which I am getting better at.

I know a lot of my bad behaviour was attention seeking or due to envy. I still get envious and still feel left out at times but I am better at recognising those feelings and stopping them impacting on my behaviour.

Like someone else said, it's cost me a lot of friendships and potential friendships over the years. I'm lonely and have no real friends but it's my own fault. Tough lesson.

This is too much of a dichotomy, I suspect.

I suspect there are very rare cases of people who are truly good or truly bad or evil. There seems to be no bottom to the depths of depravity human beings are capable of inflicting on one another. And very often it's in the face of these depravities that goodness emerges, with some people willing to risk themselves in order to spare others.

People are just human. Sometimes we're lovely. Sometimes we're arseholes. Sometimes we alter others' lives for the better. Sometimes we screw up. Sometimes we hurt people when we don't mean to. And whilst I like to think I wouldn't, some of us hurt people when we do mean to. Most people have also grown and learned a thing or two having made mistakes in the past that we'd never want to repeat.

I don't know whether I'm a 'good' person or a 'bad' person. I suspect if I added up my life, I'd turn out to be a bit of both, and some people might say one thing and others another.

But that isn't for me to judge.

Im an ok person

No.
I cannot think I am a good person. I do not even think I am an average person. Nor do I think I am evil.
I made a lot of mistakes in the past, alienated friends and family and have spent a long time trying to make up for mistakes.
Sadly to no avail.
I am in therapy, buy my self esteem is currently a bar in hell, and I absolutely cannot believe I am a good or decent person.

@theworldisadarkplace I bet your mum would have wanted you to go to your son's play.

I do

I was in a high stress situation and I did something foolish which cost me dearly. I regret it desperately so for so many reasons it lives with me.

I’m not a bad person, the person I did it to is entitled to think so though

I don’t know if this will help at all, but I am often with a person when they take their last breath. I’m a chiropodist with death/dying experience and am often asked to attend to palliative patients. Sometimes, the family aren’t there when their loved one passes, because the dying person needs to feel their feet are “right” before they leave this earth.
I firmly believe that no hospital would ever leave a dying person totally alone, and I am sometimes asked just to step into a room when a nurse needs the loo or something, I can hopefully reassure you, that it is policy to never leave a dying person on their own.

Personally yes, but I was a mug as a teenager. Part product of my environment, part hormones, part underdeveloped impulse control, but part just a bit of a mug. I don’t think my kids will be like me when they’re teenagers but they’ve had a very different upbringing and live in a very different environment. They’ll do stupid things for sure, but I don’t think it will be on the same level.

I was about 18 years old and at a party in the flat where a bunch of boys I had made friends with the previous year living in university halls were now living. There were four of them, and at the party I snogged three of them.

One was my ex who I had dated during for a few months first year who was still constantly trying to convince me to get back together, but I just wasn't interested.

Two was the quiet geeky guy who was a good friend who clearly had a crush on me, and I secretly had a crush on him but was too immature to realise what a wonderful person he was and was more worried about what my friends would say if we got together.

Three had no strings attached, we never mentioned it happened and are still in touch today.

I went to bed with my ex that night, and boy 2 has never spoken to me again. I was so drunk it took me months to remember what I'd done, but the damage was done. Almost 30 years on I still think about boy number 2 and regret that he wasn't the only person I kissed that night.

Was made to have an abortion my by now estranged husband. Only told one friend. Regret it more than anything.

Mine was stealing cash from my mum's purse as a teen, and yes, I do.

I've never stolen since. My job involves a lot of ethical considerations, and I choose to take a more principles approach. I've always worked for non-profits or companies with an ethical aim, and couldn't do a job where I was furthering a bad end (even for double the money when offered). I've never cheated one anyone, cheated someone in business. I improved working conditions in my old office as soon as I got the power - introduced WFH flex, reduced working hours and increased pay as well as getting regular staff involved in things.

I'm pretty confident that as far as moral behaviour goes, I'm in the clear. I did a bad thing when I was a kid living in difficult circumstances. I'm not going to tie myself up in remorse about it.

Exactly. I have never been in a single fight in my 70+ years.

Despite these things do posters consider themselves to be overall decent/good people?

Love this!!