boundaries and what to do with them [pseudo-rant/tw: sexual assault]

[Glides]

tw: so i'm talking about sexual assault. i pinky promise i'm not trying to get explicit, but i don't know how to explain.

hello friends. it is i.

so long story short, i want to address in therapy tomorrow something that i have never gone over with anyone else and i want y'alls opinions on how to go about it because it's sensitive as shit and honestly explains a lot.

so it was not a thing that ever felt like it was worth mentioning till recently when i was discovering a lil somethin-somethin called "boundaries," aka "hey maybe only let people touch you if you want them to touch you." i am still very bad at those but i am improving.

now it was already something to realize later on the instances in which my ex and one of my friends had assaulted me. only in the case of the latter had physical force been involved. in the case of my ex, it was always coercion that i didn't recognize, the never saying no. i dont wanna get too much into that but that's what i processed as what it was.

what i hadn't processed was something i had started doing in high school and that was frequenting those facebook type games that looked like farmville but you talked to people in a fake club or whatever. imvu is the only one of those i remember. and there was nothing more that teenage me wanted than to make new friends as a deeply isolated person. little did i know that older people would play these games as well on the lookout for people like me. you would never end up meeting anyone (at least not in my case) or hearing voices or anything but these were still instances of much older people talking me into doing things i sure as hell should not have been doing then.

i dont remember how often or how many, the only one i remember was someone who was i think 33 when i was 16 or 17. so already a huge gap, someone who talked all the time about my youth in a desirable way. no one ever talked about me like that. but you can understand exactly why i became so skewed when i was being talked into doing things i don't really want to describe here. for the longest time that seemed completely ordinary and everyone did it, all the younguns would take admiringly about older people taking an interest in them.

the other thing is that there were lots of instances that i think i repressed where it was always older people or people close to my age doing things to me i was not comfortable with. the one i remembered (and i'm gonna be as g-rated about this as i can, promise) had cornered me in a darkly lit part of campus, she was nearly thirty, and talked 17 year old me into letting her touch me and in exchange, i could touch her breasts.

all of that is so normalized in my head. wasn't just women of course, that's just the most severe example that comes to mind that i can describe without setting anyone else off.

the vast majority of my experience was not consensual. which in turn kinda explains why i was so angry when i was first on the forum. i didn't know what to do with all the hurt i was feeling. especially in a rural-ish area like i'm in, i mean i didn't know where to redirect that and the PUA fucks completely misread it and that's how i was getting banned left and right. i was seeing any expression of affection as only a way to get past my defenses.

this came up again because yesterday i saw a longtime friend i've known for a long time and she very casually expressed that she found me attractive and i did not know what to do with that. the interest isn't mutual (and she was luckily very chill about that), but also i'm so used to having to interpret signals that outright having someone tell me outright that they liked me isn't anything i knew how to do anything with. the way she described me though, despite not meaning any harm, was more or less the kind of language older people would say to me. they would highlight my "innocence" and how shy and awkward and sweet i was, and it would sort of morph me being more childlike than them into something sexual and i got anxious despite her not meaning harm. so you can see how this could be tough to explain to a therapist so i can consider healing.

i mean, i know to the denizens of the forum imagining me as sweet is funny, but lord knows i tried to look tough.

so i dont know how to explain any of this, it's not me boo-hooing about it for once. i just don't know how to frame this mess in a way that even starts to make sense. it's not like i fuckin saved documentation, i was a goddamn child and older people got their kicks from me. i even remember being congratulated after drunkenly confessing the story about the thirty year old woman. i just wanted to look mature, i wanted to look grown, and that's how i could be mature and grown, and that shit has attracted abuser after abuser ever since.

so like, how does one have a functional relationship? like i always sort of dismiss it because i was never penetrated (and i don't know a more g-rated way to say that), it was always like one person grabbing me where i didn't want to be grabbed or another person who i didn't want to kiss forcing me to kiss them. i know it's gross. i don't really know how to explain it in a way that isn't gross. then add in the shit from my ex and it's just a whole thing i need to address somehow and find a way to live with, and find a way that if someone ever loves me and i want them to, that i don't just burn that shit to the ground trying to protect myself.

this shit always happened at parties of course, and my dumbfuck neglectful parents still don't know and still assume they did a crackerjack job pretending their kid didn't exist and then wondering why they're getting called being told their sheltered religious child had alcohol poisoning.

so much to work through. nobody told me this is what adulthood is. i'm not anxious, i'm just exhausted.

[Enail]

It's not your explaining that's gross, the only thing that's gross is those people who manipulated, abused and assaulted you. There's no way to explain it nicely, because it was an awful thing that you should have never had to go through. How you explained it here was fine, I'm sure your therapist will be familiar enough with the idea of adults exploiting lonely teenagers online and IRL that they'll understand even if you can't express it perfectly.

I'm glad you feel up to bringing it up, I know that's an incredibly hard thing to talk about.  I hope it's helpful to work on it with them, and I'm so sorry all that happened to you to begin with.

[Glides]

It's not your explaining that's gross, the only thing that's gross is those people who manipulated, abused and assaulted you. There's no way to explain it nicely, because it was an awful thing that you should have never had to go through. How you explained it here was fine, I'm sure your therapist will be familiar enough with the idea of adults exploiting lonely teenagers online and IRL that they'll understand even if you can't express it perfectly.

I'm glad you feel up to bringing it up, I know that's an incredibly hard thing to talk about.  I hope it's helpful to work on it with them, and I'm so sorry all that happened to you to begin with.

It's so normalized that everyone I know has stories like that. Most people go on to have functional relationships and I don't. Nothing frustrates me more than someone going through the same type of trauma I did, then they do well and I don't. So I have to process that bitterness too, that self-loathing directed towards my own fragility.

[Enail]

It's an understandable frustration, sometimes it just seems so unfair when someone else seems to get through the same thing more easily. But you don't know what way things stick with different people, some people maybe do get through some trauma without as much aftermath out of luck or who knows, but a lot of people might just be having to deal with it in a different way or at a different time. It's not fragile to be affected by harmful things, and being up for facing them and working through them shows courage and resilience.

[Hielario]

<comment removed by mod>

[Enail]

<mod> Hielario, it is absolutely 100% unacceptable to describe harassment and abuse as in any way equivalent to regular and potentially desirable romantic attention. Don't do this again.</mod>