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

Amongst others but when i was early / mid 20s i dated a man who was effectively my best friend but unfortunately i didn’t fancy him at all.
He was so sweet; a geeky weedy type.
I bought him new clothes and made sure I did his hair for him before we went out. I bought him weights to get some muscles. If he didn’t do this stuff I would pick a fight. I picked fights with him over various random things and i kissed two other men on a girls holiday -I did tell him but he always forgave me everything.
I strung him on for almost 2 years before I finished things.
Life has a weird way of working things out and i heard from a mutual friend that he met a girl on a night out a couple of months later.
A bit of facebook stalking suggested she’s absolutely beautiful- way prettier than I was.
They’ve been together ever since.
This was 16/17 years ago and I’m ashamed of myself, I have grown up a lot.

Would you ever reach out to him?

I too have found this to be a really helpful thread personally. Have spent 20 years beating myself up about certain events and even now think very negatively about some of my behaviours and it's been really useful to see that actually I'm not some unique horror.

I'd also agree with some PPs about the messages gained in childhood about what is acceptable/ moral and how it impacts the way I have behaved.

It's only what he deserved! 🤷‍♀️

My husband used to pick his toenails and put the bits of nail on the arm rest of the sofa. So I put them in his mashed potato.

Ah, who remembers Fly Cemetery at school dinners! 🤣

I’ve posted this before. We used to have a rented TV in the 80s that you had to put 50p pieces in. When I was about 10 I broke into it with a knife and stole all the money. It was a fortune to my 10 year old self. I took all the kids in our street on the bus to the seaside for a day out.

Forty years on, my Mum still believes that we’d been burgled.

I'm old now, so I've done many bad things.

On one memorable occasion I peed in the flower planter on the rooftop of a church in Catania, Sicily.
It was cold and dark, and I was desperate...

Best one.

Oops. Your poor Mum. I'd have been shitting myself!!

So many. Aged 14 I used to get followed by men in cars when walking my dog early evening. I got in the car with one and we had some heavy petting. Then went home .

You are not the bad person here.

I’m sure the bird has forgiven you up past the Rainbow Bridge. You were only a baby yourself.

The worst thing I've ever done that I'm willing to post on the Internet is what I did to my poor mum when I was a kid.

She had this ugly little brass imp ornament and I kept moving it about and denying it. Creeped her the fuck out so she threw it away. I got it out of the bin and put it back. She freaked out, threw it away, I would go through the bins and hang onto it waiting for the perfect moment to put it back. I thought her freaking out was funny. I was young and didn't understand that she was genuinely scared and convinced something supernatural/ demonic was going on.

I confessed years later. She was as mad as hell but also relieved.

Looking back it was a horrible thing to do, but at the time I thought it was funny.

Or maybe not ... 🤔

Ha that's why they went bust,,,

I put hair removal cream in my exs shampoo- I don’t regret that!

As an ex employee at said shop I can 100% confirm none of the staff would have cared.

As a student, I worked in a pub where a regular complained about me loudly and rudely for putting 5ml too much lemonade in his lager top. He came in a couple of days later for pie and chips. I emptied the contents of the kitchen insect zapper into the pie filling, stirred, puff pastry top, in the oven, parsley sprinkle and served with a beatific smile.

I fleetingly worried that he might die, but it passed (and he didn’t).

What kind of guidance do you think you needed? I’m only asking because I have myself down some shameful things in my past that still haunt me and know k have a daughter myself to want to guide her as best as I can into knowing how to react or not be peer pressured into doing something.

You must have been in a really bad place to have done that and I can imagine when it all came out you must have felt horrendous. I hope you’re doing better now xx

That’s brutal. Way worse than having an affair or pooing outside!

I was angry at my mother for telling me off and torn some of her work papers

I stopped DP from singing.

DP has an awful voice. Actually, that's not really true. DP has a perfectly nice voice, she's just utterly tone deaf. I used to quite often hear her singing to herself and think "That's quite nice", and then ask her what it was and it'd be some song that I know, but there's no way I'd have recognised it from what she was singing. The tempo is wrong, the notes are wrong, the words are often wrong too. If she's singing along to something, or along with other people, then oh god it's painful, she can make a room of people all fail to sing Happy Birthday because they're all trying to somehow get in sync with her. Basically, there's something in between her brain and her voice that is just utterly broken.

And this intrigued me. I like weird brain stuff. I've got aphantasia and face blindness and its so weird knowing that everyone has this superpower that I don't, and that I and most of humanity have one that DP just doesn't have. So I'd talk about it lots, it made me laugh in the same way it makes DP laugh when I desperately struggle to work out who I'm talking to, only to realise half an hour later it was my Step brother. I'd gleefully tell people about DPs singing. It wasn't mean, at least it wasn't meant to be. I loved her, and part of what I loved about her is this utter inability to do something that to me seemed so basic.

And then one day we were in the car and a song DP loves came on the radio. And I realised DP wasn't singing along to it. And then I realised I hadn't heard her sing anything in months.

"You don't sing any more."
"No, I don't"

We sat in silence for a minute, while the sheer horribleness of what I'd done sunk in, and then the apologies started. I must have gone on for 15 minutes or so, apologising profusely, telling her how bad I felt, how I never wanted her to stop singing, begging her to not stop on account of me.

And she accepted my apology. But she didn't start singing again. That was a decade ago, and it's only been in the last 6 months or so that I've caught her singing. At first when she thought noone could hear her, and more recently when we've been in the car together. I've not said a word. I don't dare, in case it stops her again.

We have a wonderful relationship. I adore her, and she claims to adore me. We have the sort of relationship I'd be intensely jealous of if I wasn't in it. But I will always be the man who stopped DP from singing, and thats something I will never forgive myself for.

Drove whilst high as a kite on cannabis.

I was young, and would never do it again.

The “normal” taking drugs (coke a whole load of coke)

But the most guilt is arguments, I didn't tend to start them but holy shit I finished them…straight for the jugular every time, if I knew it would hurt I would say it, and there was no level of hell too deep.