Ever had a brief thought that you knew was wrong which then it came true and you felt really guilty about it? I’ve had two I want to confess:
Way back when I started high school in 1980 I was around 10 pounds overweight and felt like the biggest cow in the world. And I thought “wouldn’t it be great if everyone else gained weight and I stayed the same so I wouldn’t have to diet but would be considered skinny?” And it came true! I’m still about the same 5 to 10 pounds too heavy (in my entirely subjective opinion) and the US has gotten so heavy. That’s right, I’m single-handedly responsible for the obesity epidemic. And seeing the huge health problems, I feel guilty.
Incredibly horrible thought I’m tormented by: My aunt’s husband was a nice enough guy but he always seemed so uninvolved and not particularly affectionate. And not involved in my cousin’s (his son’s) life. So I had one brief thought that my aunt would never get divorced (and they didn’t have a bad marriage at all, this was a total underserved judgement on my part) but she deserves a really nice guy so she could only get remarried if something happened to my uncle. And something did. He got brain cancer and passed away at age 48 about 6 years ago. And no one deserves this, especially not a guy who’s only fault was being reserved and quiet.
I’m an inherently rational person and I know my brief thoughts in no way influenced the future but I also have this horrible streak of permanent guilt. So I’m using the SDMB as my confessional. Anyone else ever have some small horrible wish come true that they regret now?
When I was pregnant with my first child, my blood pressure started to go up and I was placed on strict bedrest around the fifth month. This left me with a lot of time on my hands, and when I couldn’t find anything to do to occupy my mind, I’d just zone out with daydreaming.
About a month before my due date, the enforced idleness was really starting to get to me. I started daydreaming about what my life would likely be like if I hadn’t become pregnant. They’d always end with me thinking ‘Well, the only way that would happen now is if I lost the baby.’ A horrible, horrible thought that usually kept me from entertaining those daydreams for at least a few days.
Then two weeks before my due date, I started having contractions. Not strong enough to go to the hospital with, but I went to bed that night thinking that I’d be woken up before morning with stronger contractions. That didn’t happen. The next morning, after I’d been awake for a couple of hours, I realized I hadn’t felt the baby move.
We went to the hospital and an ultrasound found no heartbeat. All I could think of was that I’d jinxed myself and somehow managed to kill him with my daydreams. Turns out that as he started to drop into the birth canal, he’d pinched the cord between his shoulder and my pelvis. Since I was contracting, he was wedged in there and the pressure couldn’t ease off of the cord.
I don’t blame myself anymore, but it’s taken me a long time to get to this point. Having another baby without any complications has helped a lot.
Gosh, Gwunfyd, I’m so sorry. I’m so glad your next pregnancy was successful.
That’s exactly the type of thing I’m talking about. I’m not superstitious at all (although I think all people are superstitious to some extant unless they conciously fight it) but I can’t help thinking “what if…”. This is the first time I’ve ever admitted the thing about my uncle and it’s been bothering me lately. Finally admitting it in public was cathartic for me.
I met a guy in my sophomore year of high school who was pretty nice. We didn’t know each other all that well, but I knew he had a fondness for pot and alcohol. I don’t recall exactly why, but one day I was just wondering what it would be like if he were to die.
Mid-80s I was in San Francisco. There were those elevated highway structures. I’ve been on simlar ones before and since. They’re not really that much difference than the mazes of freeway overpasses around Montreal or Toronto… but I hated the ones in San Fran. Hated them. One stretch in particular gave me serious heebie-jeebies.
I’d even ask cabbies to go the long way saying, “if there’s an earthquake, we’ll be squashed in here.”
Then there was the big quake, and I was horrified to see the exact stretch of highway I’d always hated so much being the centre of rescue operations. They collapsed in stacks, exactly the way I’d feared they would, squashing cars the way I’d pictured in my mind’s eye.
The news said there was something defective about the engineering.
I kept my guilt to myself for the better part of a year, even from my husband, and it just ate away at me inside. When I finally did come clean about it, I felt so much better. This is actually only the second time I’ve talked about it to anyone, and again it’s made me feel better about what happened. So I can understand why this would be cathartic for you. I’m glad for you too, that you finally got it out.
I love my little sister, but she’d always irritated me in ways only little sisters can. Up until last summer, whenever I’d go home and visit my mom, if we were going to do anything, she’d call my sister and ask if she wanted to come along. The last time we did this, we went out of town to go shopping, and the entire way up I sat there and listened to my sister talk about parties and boys and typical teenage girl stuff that didn’t interest me at all. Meanwhile, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise, because my sister is very talkative (When she was little and learned to talk, my mom always said that she’d talk just to hear the cound of her own voice.)
When we got to the place we were heading, she drug us around to all of the stores she wanted to go to (Oh yeah, i was 7 months pregnant at the time, so all of the walking was not fun.) and spent most of the time asking my mom to buy her stuff, and when I’d stop at a place I wanted to go to, she’d sit outside, making it obvious that she didn’t want to go there.
Anyway. I thought about how nice it would be to be able to go home and spend time with my mom on my own, without my sister around being a loud teenage girl. (That’s the only way I can describe it.)
Then my sister was in a car accident and was paralyzed and, although she’ll be moving back to our hometown soon, she was living about 1 1/2 hours from my mom. Due to her condition, she couldn’t really go out with us, although that should change soon, and so I get to go out with my mom on my own whenever I go back home. That’s not really how I wanted it, though.
This one is more recent, like two weeks ago. Before I left work, I preceeded to check my voice mail. It was an urgent message from my father. All he stated was that it was important and to call back ASAP. So I did, I opened the conversation with, “what, did [sisters name] get in an accident or something?” There was a pause, and he said, “yes, she was.”
I don’t know why I said that, maybe it was the tone of his voice in the message, but I knew instantly that something of an accident was the case. Luckily she was ok, as well as the rear-ended victim. So I think I’ll stop starting conversations like that, as guessing like that in the past has ended up being true before.
During the late 90’s there were a series of drivers losing their lives while driving in NASCAR. Shortly after Kenny Irwin died, I wondered what would happen if one of the big names of the sport was to die. February 18, 2001, Dale Earnhardt died, he was the biggest of the big.
Years ago I had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which faded from the “did I swtich ______ (insert type of electrical equipment here) off?” to the “wouldn’t it be terrible if __________ (insert type of disaster here) happened?” I’d spend hours thinking of horrible things that could happen, and on one occassion it did … I was being driven somewhere and I was thinking “oh dear what if that lorry topples over onto us?” and “oh dear, what if that van ran into us?” all the way, one of the last ones I was thinking was “oh dear what if_____ [person] has a heart attack while driving?” . We got to our destination, I got out of the car, so did he and he had a massive, fatal, heart attack …
A few years ago I really loved my job and thought, “Wouldn’t it be horrible if my boss left his job and I got a mean new boss who drove me out of here.” Well, it happened. I still have nightmares about it.
A couple of years ago, a friend of mine got a girl pregnant and decided to marry her as a result. The girl wasn’t terribly popular with our social circle in the first place, and we all knew that being a parent would mean that we’d pretty much never see this friend again for the next fifteen years or so. (Which is not so much a comment on parenting as it is on my friend’s ability to budget his time effectively) I was having lunch with a mutual friend, and I said, “Am I a horrible person for hoping she has a miscarriage?”
I am thinking of taking a trip to Spain and Portugal in late summer/early fall. Looking at airfares, I remembered the ridiculously cheap flight I took to DopeToberFest in October 2001, and idly thought, “Maybe there’ll be another terrorist attack, and flights’ll be really cheap.” I immediately felt horrible about even thinking such a thing and put it out of my mind.
Since the Madrid attack, I haven’t so much as looked to see if airfares have gone down. I feel ghoulish enough about it already.
When I was in high school, my folks were listening to the radio one morning before I left to catch the bus. The news story was about a school bus accident. Later, as I boarded my own school bus, I wondered how it would feel to have that happen to me. We got a little more than halfway through the bus route when we were hit by an out of control delivery truck. Fortunately, there was only one (minor) injury, but the bus was totalled and so was the truck that hit us.
The rail line near our house was rebuilt as a commuter line a few years ago, prior to that there were only a couple freight trains a week, and they were noisy and slow. In the reconstruction they built a few sections of double track so that north and south bound trains could pass. One day, shortly after the start of regular service I watched as a south bound train passed, then almost immediately a north bound went through, very fast, probably about 70 MPH. I couldn’t help but think that this was a disaster in waiting. Probably a month later I was coming up to this same crossing on a road that runs parallel to the tracks for a mile or so, and there was a north bound train stopped. As I rounded the next turn the side street with the crossing was blocked off by emergency vehicles and there were several local news crews. As it turned out a 16 year old kid on her bike had stopped for the south bound, as soon as it passed she ducked around the gate that was still down and past the flashing lights not seeing the oncoming train. She had just gotten out of school for the summer. Still bugs me sometimes when I go by, especially when I turn down that way, there is still a small memorial that her friend maintain. (I don’t get teary often but I just managed it)
