I have a confession to make…

I feel tremendous guilt about this and I know that it's not completely misplaced… I really want to share my story with my loved ones but this secret is making it extremely hard. It’s a secret/lie that has been gnawing at me for years now.

Here goes:

I squandered hundreds of euros (a couple thousand) on prostitution when I was 23 to about 26. But the worst part is that the money was in part from an inheritance my mom parked on my savings account, after the death of her mother, my grandmother…

She found out one day when she asked me to transfer the money to her, and I couldn’t. I froze and didn’t tell her why. She of course got mad and disappointed, but she never asked where it went or what I spent it on. She just never spoke to me about it again.

Dammit, typing it out like this I feel even more disgusted with myself…

I now know that this was a way shy, virgin, traumatized me, having access to free public transport and extra money’, expressed my hypersexuality problem…

But that doesn’t make it any less painful. I have a feeling that it is time for me to come clean about this though...

I think the fear of opening up about my story and struggles to them relates to this secret in a few ways:

• The idea of piling this on top of the whole shock about my story in the first place
• Maybe I chicken out of coming clean about this secret, making me feel like an even bigger liar and fraud
• I’m scared my mom is going to connect the dots before I come clean
• The fear of disappointing my family. Maybe my mom won’t forgive me, maybe she will, maybe I believe I wouldn’t deserve it if she did?
• Dealing with the huge shame and guilt from both the prostitution and the wasting/stealing the money itself

Any and all thoughts/insight are appreciated. How would you approach this? Have you had a painful secret related to, but not being the actual, abuse that torments you? Did you come clean about it? How do you deal with overthinking these kinds of things?

Thank you for reading <3