Own your past out loud. It loses its power to embarrass you the moment you stop hiding it.

A secret takes maintenance. Keeping something hidden means monitoring conversations, steering away from certain subjects and carrying a low background worry about being found out, and that work is usually heavier than the thing itself. Saying it plainly removes the leverage, because there is nothing left to expose. What people mostly react to is the shame in the telling rather than the content.

You are not obliged to tell anybody anything, and you choose who and when. Start with one person you trust, in ordinary language, without apologizing for it. Most of the fear turns out to have been about the hiding.