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

[shehardlysleeps]

I’m in a reflective mood, and it’s got me thinking about something I did a few years ago which is probably the thing I’m most deeply ashamed of.

There was a coworker who really rubbed me up the wrong way. I was very unhappy at the time, and going through an awful time personally. She would make snide comments about me, do things with my family members (who were colleagues too) which really got my back up, I felt like she judged me harshly and was pretty rude. Along with another colleague they made three or four very nasty comments which still stick with me.

Instead of raising a grievance, which I should have done, I took to posting about her on another website (along the lines of Mumsnet), not realising she used it too. She saw the posts and reported me, and I ended up facing a meeting with HR and a senior partner of the firm I was working in. It damaged my reputation within the firm forever and I ended up leaving after not being offered a promotion. I still feel ashamed of it now, nearly half a decade on, and feel like it’s tarred me forever.

Whats the worst thing you’ve ever done?

This is exactly how I feel too. I’ve put a lot of work into reflecting and trying to be a better person but know that my family never will.

Jesus. The cheek of your “lol”.

i don’t know, as I’m not that poster. I assume she’s been brainwashed by patriarchal ideas about a woman’s morality residing in her vagina.

You and me both x

I thought at first that the poster up thread put weedkiller ice cubes in her neighbours' drinks, presumably typing from her cell in HM Prison! 🤣

I repeatedly cheated on a boyfriend. We had 5 year relationship from when I was 17-22, and I cheated on him prolifically for the first 3 years. I really did love him, but I wasn't mature enough for such a serious relationship. He had suspicions but I would lie my way out of it. I realised the error of my ways and behaved myself for the last two years, but the relationship was tainted with suspicion and I eventually lost him. I've never forgiven myself for it and I've never cheated on anyone since.

Lots more occurring to me now. When I was young (teens/early 20s), I behaved really awfully in relationships when I felt jealous/insecure (which was often, as I grew up without really any maternal warmth or nurturing). On one level, I look back and think I must have looked a right twat, but also I try to have some empathy for the young woman I was, acting out because she just wanted to be loved. Not at all wanting to excuse my behaviour, just wanting to kind of give that young girl a hug because she was really hurting.

Worst thing that I dont care about happened nearly 30 years ago - Broke a womans cheekbone, nose and a couple of ribs.

Was a Saturday night at the pub and she was the local "hard as nails" who had an issue with me - at the time I had no idea why as I didnt know her/hadn't spoken to her and had only been living in the city for just over a month - literally had not a thing to do with her.

She walked up to me and spat in my face. I cleaned it off like WTF but didn't respond. A friend I was with helped me tidy up and said to ignore her because she was known for trying to start fights and if you respond she batters you.

Later the same evening my friends and I had moved out to the beer garden and she came up to me again and punched me in the face, and i still didnt do anything because higher ground turn the other cheek etc and people were watching.
As I was rubbing my face she hoiked and spat at me again.

I got the "red mist" and it all went a bit blank but as I came round I'd got her pinned by the throat over a picnic table and was punching her in the face and people were trying to pull me off and yelling - there was a fair bit of blood on both of us from her nose and mouth.

Somebody had called the police and I was arrested for assault but released without charge later that night when the landlord and head bartender went to the station and spoke to the police - told them about the earlier spitting incident, and that i responded to being assulted and wasnt the initial aggressor.

Found out later that she'd had to go to hospital and that I'd done some damage.

Also found out that her issue was me "humiliating" her best friend a couple of weeks beforehand. My sin was declining a drink "sent over" to me while I was working bar in a different pub.
I thought nothing of it because house rule was no alcohol while you're serving it so had retuened it to table with a thanks but no thanks im working.
Apparently this was akin to a major crime if you think you're a lesbian mobster.

I still think back to that sometimes because Im so calm and conflict avoidant. Worries me a little that when my temper blew I had no control or real memory of the moment, it was genuinely a red mist moment. Never had it again and hope i never will because it felt dangerous.

Worst thing that I DO care about and was a complete accident but i still feel terrible -
Postman knocked the front door while I was in the hallway, my dog is a bed "tosser" and had flung it also into the hallway and was sleeping in it - as I was stepping over the bed at speed, she simultaneously jumped up to go bark at the front door and my foot collided with her head - i kicked her square in the face.
I just remember THE HORROR.
She didnt make a sound but had this stunned look on her little face that will guilt me ever more, as will the sound of my foot colliding.
My only consolation was that I was wearing a croc which i hope softened things.

This was a over a year ago and I still apologise to her and feel absolutely rotten.

Agree! Some of the others were due to circumstances and trauma. This was due to her daughter being inadequate and she bullied people out of a job. It’s disgusting actually.

I was 5 years old, on a school trip to Cotswold's Wildlife Park, and I tried to feed a pig with some of the pellets we'd been given. A pellet went straight down the pig's nostril and it squealed in fright/rage and I ran away. I never said anything to anyone but for years afterwards would go cold with horror at the thought of potentially having killed that pig. I realise now, over 40 years later, that it was quite unlikely that I did.

When I was 17/18, and still at school, I had a lovely boyfriend for about a year who I adored. However, within a few months of moving away to go to university I met somebody else at a party and decided I had to end things with my long-term boyfriend. He was due to visit me, but I told him I wanted to come home for the weekend instead. He kept asking me why, so I ended up telling him that I wanted to end our relationship because I had met someone else.He was absolutely distraught. Thirty-seven years later I still feel ashamed about how I behaved. My guilt at the time was only reinforced by my parents refusing to speak to me for months because of what I had done.

Well done!

I was involved in a long term affair.

Because of what you'd done? Ended it with a boyfriend when you started uni?

Your parents made you think that was a terrible thing to do?

I don’t think you should feel ashamed about this - ultimately you told him the truth. And it’s absolutely not on for your parents to have refused to speak to you for months because of this, at the age of 18. I’m sorry that happened to you.

@Temp2024 this is so sad to read!
Theres not a single person who hasn’t made a mistake!
Time to stop beating yourself up…let the past go, tomorrow is a new day.

I think we've all been dumped, flung ourselves onto the bed, sobbed our hearts out, moped about for... a week or two, then picked ourselves up and got on with our lives. In fact imo dumping someone is doing them a favour, even if it doesn't seem like that at the time, as it frees them to be with someone who actually wants to be with them, or at least no longer wasting time in a no hope relationship that's going nowhere. A few months after my great "heartbreak" I met my now DH that I've been with for 31 years, married 28, so it all ended okay.

But you did absolutely nothing wrong! No one is obliged to stick with their teenage boyfriend for life, however lovely they are! You didn’t keep him hanging while you shagged your way though the entire population, and you were planning to do the decent thing and break up with him face to face on home turf until he forced your hand over the phone.

I think it’s your parents’ bizarre overreaction that has given you this hugely inflated sense of having done wrong when in fact you were blameless, even decent in how you approached ending things, @seagullsandbeachhuts.

We had neighbours who had a huge amount of renovations to their house and garden done for over a year during lockdown. It was so noisy, including multiple deliveries before 7am with beeping lorries reversing, loud music playing, etc. When I went round once the site manager was arsy and aggressive with me. And as it was lockdown we were trying to work from home amidst all the noise, and it wasn't easy to just go out or go on holiday to get away from it all for a while. And of course the house owners were living elsewhere.

We moved not long after - we were thinking about moving anyway before all this.

I signed both of them up for a lot of embarrassing or irritating catalogues - religious information and surgical corsets, for example.

I wish I had thought of the weedkiller ice cubes on the lawn idea mentioned above. Or sneaking in at night and writing 'I'm a selfish prick' on the lawn in weedkiller. I toyed with the idea of buying some Japanese knotweed and chucking it over the fence, but sadly that's illegal.

Honestly, after reading this thread I'm not even willing to post what the worst things I've done are!

I spent many, many years in self-destruct mode as a result of childhood trauma (which isn't an excuse, but perhaps an explanation to myself to help me understand how I could behave in a way that feels unrecognisable to me now). All of the worst things I've done involve romantic/sexual relationships.

More recently, I joked with my friend about 'cursing' someone who was a cruel bully... he dropped dead that day (I'm unclear on the timings, to be fair, it might have been before that conversation!). I also have a DS who recently binned last year's Easter eggs that he hadn't eaten. Each time I'm in his bedroom and spot on of this year's spoils open, I have a little bit. I consider it to be doing my bit to reduce food waste 😁

But @Keepgettingolder81 didn't you ever snog your husband/share a drink/both use the same spoon to eat a dessert? In which case you would have been getting the toilet germs too!

There was one of these in my work. Everyone hated her. Then the mum got the boyfriend a job too. Everyone hated him. The mother retired. They both got demoted and are off sick now for 6 months of every year. Won’t be long until they’re sacked. Two useless people enabled by a mother who knew that they were both not that bright and very lazy.

Same here , i go over and over things i did when i was younger, silly situations i put myself in.wish my younger self had known what i know now

How utterly shameful.

And you think it's funny?

I've never assaulted or abused anyone, so don't get to claim a 'worst' in that way. But my own personal worsts are things I'm so ashamed of that I have never talked about them before, other than in therapy. The most serious were either sins of omission, or issues stemming from screwed up boundaries and attachment style (some terrible things were done to me in childhood; I have cPTSD) which hurt others and ruined some of my earlier relationships.

Then I lost my mum - my anchor; I had an abusive father - to a highly aggressive brain cancer when I was in my 20s. She, I and my DB were all NC with my father. At that point I wasn't a child, but caring for a terminally ill patient was beyond my remit at that age and I quickly found myself (as the female child) the one with the bulk of the responsibility.

I didn't have time to fuck that up. She died within mere weeks of the first symptoms presenting themselves, and we were as close as a mother and daughter could be. Nothing was left unsaid and I'm not left with guilt about not loving her as much as I could whilst she was still alive. But after that happened - my aunt had died 18 months before and my maternal grandparents therefore outlived both their children - my grandfather developed dementia - unclocked by me at first as I was dealing with other things. He went quite literally off his head with grief. This was around 4 years before his actual death and whilst I did my best I'm not at all sure I supported him as well as I might have. I had bills to pay and other sick family members to care for.

In the interim, my grandmother already had MND when my mother was diagnosed, and went into a decline after her death. It really was the worst thing I've ever witnessed: such a cruel disease. By the end she was begging to die. She wanted me to help her. I think my mother might have (She died 6 months to the day before my grandmother) but I stalled. I'd never heard of Dignitas at that age, and couldn't have afforded it if I had. And I couldn't raise a hand against her to help her, even though I knew that was what she wanted. I was afraid of facing a murder charge. So I discovered something about myself that I never previously knew: that when the chips are down, I'm a coward.

I've lived with that knowledge ever since and never been able to dispel the guilt.

It's been 23 years.