The Secret Thoughts

The Secret Thoughts We All Have But Never Say Out Loud

You think them in grocery store lines, during work meetings, at family dinners. Those raw, honest thoughts that flicker through your mind before you catch them and stuff them back down. The thoughts that would make you seem terrible if you said them, but make you human because you think them.

Like how sometimes you’re secretly relieved when plans get cancelled. How you’ve fantasized about what your funeral would be like and who would come. How you’ve compared your grief to other people’s grief and wondered if yours is real enough. How you sometimes hope your ex is doing badly, just a little.

You think about whether your friends actually like you or just tolerate you. Whether your parents are disappointed in who you became. Whether you married the right person or just the person who was there when you got scared of being alone. Whether your children will spend years in therapy talking about your mistakes.

In quiet moments, darker thoughts surface: you’ve imagined what would happen if you just… didn’t come home one day. Not suicide, exactly, but disappearing. Starting over somewhere where no one expects anything from you. You’ve calculated how long it would take people to notice you were gone, and the number was smaller than you hoped.

You think about money constantly, even when you pretend you don’t. You know exactly how much everyone around you makes and where you stand in comparison. You’ve Googled your net worth against national averages. You’ve felt genuine anger at friends who complain about problems money could solve when you’re drowning in debt they know nothing about.

You’ve had sexual thoughts about people you shouldn’t. You’ve felt attracted to friends’ partners, married colleagues, people decades older or younger than appropriate. Not acted on it, just… noticed. And then felt guilty for being human.

You think about your body in ways that would horrify the body-positive police. You’ve sucked in your stomach in photos, chosen clothes to hide what you hate, avoided mirrors on bad days. You’ve felt genuine envy watching someone eat carelessly when every bite you take carries the weight of self-judgment.

Sometimes you look at your life and think: “Is this it?” Not dramatically, just… practically. You wonder if you peaked in high school or college. Whether you’re living someone else’s dreams instead of your own. Whether it’s too late to become who you thought you’d be.

You’ve felt bored during moments you knew you should feel grateful for. Bored during your child’s recital, your partner’s story, your friend’s crisis. You’ve performed interest so convincingly that you’ve forgotten what genuine enthusiasm feels like.

The cruelest unspoken thought: you sometimes wonder if you’re a good person or just someone who’s gotten good at appearing good. Whether your kindness comes from genuine compassion or just the exhaustion of imagining conflict.

These thoughts make you feel alone, but here’s the secret: everyone has them. That person who seems to have it all together? They’re wondering if they’re secretly terrible. That friend who’s always positive? They’ve imagined their own funeral too. That colleague who seems so confident? They’re calculating their worth against yours just like you’re calculating yours against theirs.

We live in this strange collective isolation, each carrying the same bundle of human thoughts, each convinced we’re uniquely flawed for thinking them. We’ve created a world where having a human mind feels like a shameful secret.

But maybe these thoughts aren’t evidence that we’re broken. Maybe they’re evidence that we’re alive, conscious, complicated creatures trying to navigate impossible complexity with inadequate tools. Maybe the fact that we feel guilty about thinking them means we’re not actually terrible people—terrible people don’t feel guilty.

The things we don’t say out loud aren’t always our deepest truths. Sometimes they’re just our most human moments, the ones that remind us we’re all fumbling through this together, pretending we know what we’re doing.

Maybe the most radical thing we could do is admit we all have minds full of messy, contradictory, embarrassing thoughts. Maybe normalizing our inner chaos is the path to actual connection.

Maybe the things we don’t say out loud are exactly the things we need to hear someone else whisper: “I think this too. You’re not alone. You’re not terrible. You’re just human.”