Bonus: The Secrets Hotline

Stories from our friends at The Secrets Hotline Podcast, hosted by Nick van der Kolk.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
High Family Secrets Family. As we prepare for the launch
of our eighth season at the beginning of May, finally
coming soon, I want to wet your appetite by sharing
with you what feels like a sibling podcast to Family Secrets,
created by the podcaster extraordinaire Nick vander Kolk, the Secrets Hotline.

(00:23):
Nick has put together some examples of the anonymous recordings
people leave on the Secrets Hotline, and I think one
of the things that's most fascinating about this show is
the huge range of what constitutes a secret. I hope
you enjoy it and follow Nick's show, and I'll be
back soon with a bit more bonus content and the
all new season. Oh boy, this is going to be

(00:52):
a weird probably not that weird. But I'm nineteen year
years old, relatively Yeah, maybe I smoke a bit too much.
Let me try this again. I'm a more or less

(01:13):
run of the mill, mentally unstable nineteen year old. I
recently bought myself a path of fire. I mean usually
I I'm gonna try this again, all right, I'm gonna
take a pause. Okay, Um, I'm nineteen relatively normal person,

(01:39):
not shy at all. I tell my whole life story
to anyone who wants to listen. I'm pretty much in
a book, but I just bought a Path of Fire,
and I'm concerned because I really like it. It makes
me feel safe. I've been trying to think of for
the last two days as I'm slowly admitting that I

(02:01):
like this, if I can make it cool, like put
spikes on it or something, and like make easy to
pacifier my thing, because the more that I'm like at
home alone, the more I keep using this pacifier. And
I'm scared that, like I don't know, one day I'm
gonna want it and people are gonna be like, like
if I have a partner one day or someone seep

(02:23):
do and they're gonna be like, what the fuck? And
I but I just don't know how to make it
part of my brand oo weird or that's the one
thing in my life that I don't feel comfortable talk about.
But here we are. Thanks so much for the show.
Love you. Oh do not mean to say that, I'm
so sorry? Bye? Hi. My secret is that I secretly

(02:54):
enjoy when the family members passed. It's not so much
that I enjoy it, but I guess it's more like
there's something cathartic in the anticipation and release of somebody
close to me getting sick and then eventually going. I

(03:15):
certainly feel sorrow when they do go, and I miss
people and have empathy for my other loved ones who
are also sad, But there's something absolutely irresistible to me
about that anticipation and release. Like a few years ago,
my mother in law got cancer and died over the
course of a year, and I remember the entire time

(03:38):
I was just sort of like thoroughly enjoyed the process
of anticipating, you know, her eventual end, and then her
going was this huge relief. It was almost a pleasurable experience.
I actually looked back on that process fondly. I guess
the more secretive part of this is her husband, my

(03:59):
father WA, who I have kind of grown to dislike
over the last few years, is slowly entering on his
data failing. How I secretly kind of can't wait till
he passes. Oh Hi, my name is, but don't tell anyone.

(04:25):
My secret is that I think about death and dying
a lot, a lot more than I think I talk
about with other people. Something struck me as riding my
bike and then it was like something plouched on my
head and I just realized that I was gonna die,
and then everyone around me was going to die, and
all of us are going to die. We're all gonna die.

(04:47):
It was unshakable. It was something that I couldn't get
rid of that kept eating at me for a while,
and I kept thinking about how doomed everyone is. It's
easy to think that, particularly now these days. But then
another why plumped in my head and it said, well,
you're already born. It's too late. That totally changed everything,

(05:13):
because it made it feel like death wasn't about losing something,
but death was about participating in something like it was
about connecting to your world. Dying with part of connecting
to your world. And I think about that a lot,
and it may seem it's really sad and really happy

(05:37):
at the same time, because it's something we all have
to do, and weirdly like it's a gift we give
to our world. I don't think we should die, I
mean right away and not doing anything to do that now,
But when it happens, I don't know, think of it

(06:00):
as a gift you're giving your body, so like everything
that ever made you who you were in the first place.
A little scary, but I guess I'm saying doesn't need
to be because it's just going to happen. You're already born.
It's too late, Hi, I think it might be easier

(06:26):
for a Catholic to understand this particular secret. But I
was a Catholic for a long time, and I guess
about twenty years ago I started to lose all confidence
that there was a such thing as a God who
interacted with people on earth and you know, answered prayers
in magical favors. So I basically became an agnostic slash

(06:50):
atheist at that time. About twenty years ago, I worked
in an office with a lot of people, and they
all think of me as this really Catholic person because
there's a bunch of Catholics in the office too. Some
of the people in my department are my best friends
and they're all Catholics. Well, a few years ago I cancer.
It is an incurable form of cancer, and everybody was

(07:11):
really afraid, you know, that I was going to die.
And it's been treated, so I've still got a few
years left in me, but I still have it and
I still have to go to get chemo every week
like I had for the past four and a half years.
These folks want to pray with me, and they want
to pray for me, and they give me a little
religious messages. We all text together and there's little religious

(07:33):
messages in there, and I keep getting invited to go
in prayer circles and retreats. I'm turning all that stuff down.
I never did do that stuff when I was a Catholic,
and I'm sure I'm not going to do it now,
but I was one of the last vestiges of Catholicism
that I have. It's feeling a little guilty that basically
I'm lying to these people about being religious because I've

(07:56):
never fasted up to them. There are a few people
in the office who know that I really I'm more
of a non spiritual Buddhist kind of a person where
I'm kind of searching for enlightenment. But the vast majority
of the people around me think, oh, he's a Catholic,
We're going to pray for him because he's sick. I
feel like telling him, if God didn't want me to

(08:17):
have cancer, he wouldn't have to pray for it. He
wouldn't have given it to me anyway, it's a messing.
Let me tell you about the time that I committed perjury.
My rapist is suing me for defamation of character because

(08:44):
I told people that he raped me, and they asked
me a lot of questions about my sexual history because
apparently sluts can't get raped, but that's yeah, and I

(09:05):
minimized my history for sure. But then also they asked
me if I had any malice or ill will towards him,
and those are key legal term for determining defamation. And

(09:27):
I had to lie through my teeth and pretends that
I didn't picture him blowing up, like exploding into the
jillion little pieces like a bomb, blew up inside of
his stomach or something. Every time I closed my eyes
while I was sitting there in the courtroom having to

(09:48):
listen to him lie about what he did to me,
I had to pretend I said that no, I didn't
have any malice or ill will towards him, and all
I wanted was to be left alone. And I wasn't angry.
I was just hurt. But god damn it, if I'm angry,

(10:10):
thanks for listening. Hi, I'm here to leave the secret.
My name is I'm a female in her twenties. I'm
covered in tattoos. I was a firefighter, both structure and wildland.

(10:35):
I worked pretty dirty jobs and people tend to mistake
me as very maculum lesbian. I like to make myself
seem very gruffin edgy looking to other people, but when
I come home at night, I like to stumble with
my stuffed animals. My bed is covered in Pokemon stuffed animals.

(10:58):
My favorite is a dorky looking charmander that was made
in the nineties, and he's my favorite. He's my emotional
support squad. Oh man, secret, Now I'm on the spot.
I called after that, I guess my secret I'm not
secret is that I don't know what I'm gonna say.

(11:19):
And now I'm on the should call back again. I'm
gonna pretend again. My secret is that I tried to
change my life after having a dead end job for
eight years, spent the last two years in graduate school.

(11:40):
And the secret I'm afraid to tell my friends is
that I can't find the job and I'm quickly burning
through all of my savings. I think I barely have
like two thousand dollars in the bank, but I'm afraid
to tell people. I'm afraid to tell people that I'm
I'm gonna have to go back to that dead end
job that I swore I would never do again. Okay,

(12:01):
I think I just have this weird compulsion to look
up infections like skin infections are like parasites, and I

(12:26):
just I'm just fascinated by it. I'm just fascinated with
things that are repulsive. I don't know, that's just like
not something you don't want to tell everybody because that's
just weird, it's flawed. But anyways, yeah, Hi, I am

(12:57):
calling this number to lead a secret. Tonight, I ate
an entire pink of chocolate peanut butter ice cream and
it was docious and it took probably only ten minutes
or so for me to do that. But the reason

(13:17):
this is such a scandals because I have a PhD
and nutrition and I'm currently a scientist studying obesity and
type two diabetes. So who would I be able to
share the secret with? Hey? My secret is, since I

(13:38):
was a child, I've been an atheist. Like I just
never felt any kind of religious feelings in my life.
I may have tried praying a whole like five times,
but the year Mario Kart eight came out around Christmas time.

(14:00):
I prayed to God, I said, I will believe in
you forever if you get me Mario Kart eight, and
lo and behold, Christmas Day comes and I get Mario
Kart eight and I'm like, oh, so happy about it.
And my parents come and tell me and they say,

(14:20):
you know, it was really hard to find that we
almost gave up and then we found it. And their
specific words were, it was like a miracle. And since
then I still don't believe in God, but I think

(14:42):
about that fairly often. There was one time I came
back from a bar and I was walking towards the
subway in Manhattan. I passed by stack of books that

(15:02):
I thought were free books, so I snagged one of
them off the top. What I didn't notice is that
they were sitting on top of a blanket on the
side of the street. And the book I snagged, the title,
I think, said something about how to make yourself a
better candidate for interviews for jobs. I flipped through it

(15:26):
and the entire thing was dog yeared and highlighted, and
clearly some homeless guy had really studied this book to
make his plans to better his life. And so by
the time I got into the subway, I realized this.
It made me sick in the stomach that I would
have taken this from somebody. And then I as soon

(15:49):
as I got off the train, I threw it in
the trash. And I feel awful about doing that. I
hate that I did that. I hate that I couldn't
have just taken the train back and put it back
in the stack. I just want to say to him,

(16:09):
I'm sorry. Hi. I guess I'd rather remain anonymous, even
though my secret is, in my opinion, really dumb. But
I play wordle every day and I pick it pretty
serious in a sense. But I also have been what

(16:35):
I feel like the people I play with would consider cheating.
I use a word generator online to generate a word
to start with, because I couldn't really think of anything
original anymore. And then what I've done is I've taken
the archive of every wordle so far, and I plug

(16:56):
that into a website that took all the words and
made a list alphabetically, and I keep that in my
notes on my phone, and so every wordle every day,
I put that new word into this alphabetize a list,
and that way I can see what wordle was played,
and I won't reuse that word, thinking that I'm coming

(17:17):
up with an original word. And not only that, but
based off of my tiles. In this game, I use
this website called word Hippo, which allows me to plug
in letters in a five letter word either exclude or
include those letters, and so I'm able to generate every

(17:40):
common five letter word that does or doesn't have the
letters that I want, and since then, I have basically
not gotten better a big game