It’s not for the feint of heart, but thousands of people are regularly reading some of the deepest, darkest confessions that anonymous locals are now daring to share publicly.
Since its creation in May, the Okanagan Confessions page on Facebook has ballooned in popularity on the simple premise of people posting their secrets — most dirty, some not — for all the world to see.
The page’s creator, who spoke to the Western News on condition of anonymity to protect her safety and the spirit of the project, said it was built to be entertaining, but also to help people “get a load off.”
“I think it gives people an opportunity to say things they probably wouldn’t have, they wouldn’t admit to,” said the 27-year-old Penticton woman, who asked to be identified as Lilah.
Some of the tamer recent confessions include:
— “5 years ago I ended a solid relationship with a good solid man of 4 years because I was having an affair with my married boss. My boss was mid 40's and I mid 20’s…. 3 months later I'm living with my boss who is getting a divorce when the sheriff shows up and gives us an eviction order by the court, now it turns out he was the princess of the marriage and the wife was the rich one. He had nothing and I was screwed. We were both fired 2 weeks later after that and i had to move back to my parents small tacky house.”
— “I absolutely love the smell of piercings.”
— “I confess that when I was a kid in foster care, my foster mom in Penticton didn't feed me, so I shop lifted food all of the time. The sad part is, is that I wanted to get caught, so I would be taken away from there, but I was never caught.”
Most of the confessions are sexually explicit, some too much so for publication on the Facebook page.
“There’s a lot that (does) get posted so you can imagine… what isn’t getting posted,” Lilah said, adding that, still, “about 60 per cent of what gets posted shocks me.”
Lilah said she came across the idea for the page while visiting family in an Alberta town where a similar group existed.
She was soon spending almost every waking hour maintaining the Okanagan version until enlisting the help of three administrators to collect the confessions from an open Google document, post them on Facebook, then moderate the comments to ensure they don’t name names and are in relatively good taste.
Lilah encourages people who notice questionable comments or behaviour to report it right away.
So long as a certain level of decorum is maintained, Okanagan Confessions will continue on, although she’s at a loss to explain what it is about people that attracts them to the page, other than it offers them freedom to shock, offend and spill their guts without fear of retribution.
“As long as they’re anonymous,” Lilah said, “they can say whatever they truly want to say.”