If You Haven't Read These "Extra Safe Space" Entries Yet, You Have A Life-Changing Experience Ahead
Today, I am thankful that you've shared so many embarrassing, humiliating, shocking, gross, sordid, devastating, unconscionable, despicable, riveting, distressing, never-before-told secrets here.
Extra Safe Space is a place for things you’ve never told anyone before. These will always be kept completely anonymous. To tell your secret, fill out this form (it doesn’t ask for or record any identifying info). That is the only criterion. Or read other people’s here as they come in.
When I came up with the idea for Extra Safe Space, I wasn’t sure how many people would actually use the forum we were creating to share things that they had never told anyone before. I was concerned that they would be worried about the anonymity portion, even though we made sure to set it up so that even we have no idea who they're coming from or where. But after witnessing and being part of the whole over-confessionalization of online media (hello XOJane!), I felt like there was still another level to mine - in a way that would make all of us reading feel better about our own circumstances and not being alone in them.
Partly because we don't send out emails alerting people to installments to our Extra Safe Space column, they haven't been as widely read as everything else on the site (at a ratio of like one to 1000). But the people who love them, clearly love them. There are community members who only come here to read them and nothing else on the site – which is absolutely fine and dandy.
We talked in our staff meeting the other day about highlighting some ESS entries for you this week, in case you hadn’t seen them before. (Or if, like me, you are someone who goes back and rereads writing you like multiple times. Especially when it's your own writing that you're proud of. Does everyone else do that too? Speaking of embarrassing.)
I didn't really get the tie-in to running them on Thanksgiving when the staff suggested it, because I thought that most of these entries are so so intimate and inappropriate (my favorite quality) that they are kind of the opposite of what you would talk about while gathered around the turkey. But Charlie and Esther and Vanessa convinced me that it made sense to run these on Thanksgiving day, when the conversation eventually inevitably segues into adults-only topics, and that these ESS submissions would be conversation starters for that. So I'm going with that, and thinking also that these will probably at the very least keep you awake after you eat all that turkey.
Note that I read a New York Times article the other day that claimed that the tryptophan in turkey is too small an amount to actually make you sleepy, but I beg to differ based on my own N-of-one research. Enjoy yours! And enjoy these top ten ESS entries (according to us - beg to differ in the comments of course!) of all time…
I have twin daughters and all three of us recently got some urinary tract infection or maybe bacterial vaginosis. We didn't get a diagnosis because we treated them at home with cranberry juice and they did fortunately go away. I realized that I think the culprit is our family dog because I saw him licking the crotch of my daughters' exercise tights that were left on their bedroom floor and then saw the same dog licking my underwear from the bathroom floor, which I then rewore (I'm sorry to admit that, but this is why it's good this is confidential. It's usual for me to wear underwear again for another day or the rest of that day if it doesn't smell.) I haven't told this to anyone, including my daughters. Is this the grossest thing you've heard in a while?
Ever since I started on Ozempic it has