Telling Secrets Online

I've done many unsavory things in my life, and it's hard to keep it all to myself. I've tried therapy off and on for the last eleven years. It was always a bust because I didn't want advice, I just wanted to tell someone what I'd done and how I felt. It made me feel lousy to pay someone to listen to my problems.

The solution, I've found, is to unload my guilty secrets on the Internet using a website designed for just that. I can do so anonymously and without worry that I might be hurting someone by telling them how I truly feel. It's also nice to unburden myself for free, and in the comfort of my own home. Setting my dilemmas loose in the void of cyberspace is a great way to get them out of my mind. For the really unpleasant secrets, I post to Secret Talk.

Secret Talk is often used for advice, wherein you submit a problem and a question and other users give you their feedback. It helps to be able to see things from different perspectives, especially if you're making a difficult decision. Of course you shouldn't rely entirely on what other people tell you, unless you're at the coin toss stage of your dilemma. By "coin toss", I mean you don't care which decision you're forced to make as long as the decision is made for you.

But not all secrets are bad, some are funny -- they're just not the kind of thing you want to tell your therapist or your parents. For those secrets and nefarious adventures, I use Storg. Even if you don't need to tell your story, there are plenty of random stories to read for entertainment and, occasionally, enlightenment. Best of all, you can tell your story anonymously.

Storg is a useful tool for recounting nostalgic experiences in the form of stories. Obviously, if you prefer to abbreviate yours, you're more than welcome to. Storg serves a dual purpose: To provide an outlet for you, the writer, and entertainment or insight for us, the readers. Reading stories which tell of encounters similar to your own can help you if you're feeling alienated because of something that happened to you.

I was introduced to Secret Talk in my high school driver ed class while another group was out driving, and it came in very handy for me at the time because I was having some problems. I found Storg on my own recently, and I think I prefer it. Stories are a better outlet for me than simplifying my problem. It lets me get more off my chest at once, and I don't have to know what others are thinking about what I've just written.

There was a time when I wrote my problems down in a blog, but the wrong eyes seemed to inevitably read things they didn't like, and that led to awkwardness and a falling out on more than one occasion. Being able to anonymously gripe or confess is great. No one gets hurt, and I feel much better afterward. If you've got something you want to put out of your mind, I suggest you banish it to the cyberspace ether and move on.