*TW for sexual assault*

This is not something I usually talk about, but I’d like to take advantage of the anonymity of these posts. 

When I was 13, just about to turn 14, in my freshman year of high school, an upperclassman asked me out. He was 15 then. Once again, I was just 13, fresh out of middle school- I didn’t know any better, and I no longer blame myself for it, but it’s still always something I wish I could go back and stop him from doing. 

Any chance he got alone with me was him begging me to have sex with him. “Not now” or “later” was never good enough for him, which makes me laugh now considering he taught lessons on consent to our school’s gender + sexuality club. I’d never imagine the same person saying “consent is as simple as tea! You wouldn’t force someone to drink tea,” well, make me drink that “tea.” It all happened so fast, and my relationship with him left me with not many friends to talk to, so it felt like something I was all alone with at the moment. I thought I had gotten lucky, though, when someone who knew him had talked to me about how they felt weird around him, and that he was pushy about things. I naively told them about how he sexually assaulted me. This person was actually a close friend of his, who ended up both misgendering, deadnaming, and spreading lies about me. I cried all the time at school because he had turned everyone against me. I gave him everything he wanted, and I got nothing back.

All I wanted after being with him was to “reclaim” virginity. I felt gross, I constantly felt uncomfortable in my own skin, and sex, no matter what context, terrified me. Seeing anything related to sex in any way gave me panic and anxiety attacks, as the only thing that would replayed in my mind was what he did to me. All the 14 year-old me wanted was to go back in time and stop it. All the 14 year-old me wanted to have back was my purity and innocence. I wanted to be seen as a virgin. I didn’t want that experience of sexual assault to count as any type of sex at all.

When he graduated, I thought things would be peaceful. I was so relieved thinking that I would most likely never have to see him again. But the complete opposite happened, he somehow indirectly (for the most part) made it into every single bit of my life. His friends would talk badly about me, his posts would show up everywhere, and our relationship was constantly brought up in conversations. I couldn’t escape or get what he had done off my mind. When I graduated myself, I thought he had moved away, but I was wrong about that too. Now he was back in the area, now he was everywhere again. Even when I felt safe with my current partner, at the time, he could still see how much I was hurt and scared. I felt stuck in this loop with no way to break out of it. I would beg and plead with myself to get out of the loop in any way I possibly could. It wasn’t easy, and I don’t know how I did it, but one day everything just started feeling “normal.” Maybe it was simply the passing of time, or being able to forget it enough, that let me feel less afraid.

I’m glad though that I came out of everything with really great friends who supported me and a that I had a very wonderful partner who helped me through when my trauma over my sexual assault was at its worst. Unfortunately though, I don’t have the greatest happy ending with this, and I imagine SA victims experiencing the same. I still see the same person who hurt me often, with no way of avoiding him, which brings up a terrible, sick feeling in me. I still see him thrive, while me and other victims struggle to talk about things he’s done. 

If you read this far, thank you for reading. Although my story doesn’t exactly have the happiest of endings, I am genuinely doing very great right now! I luckily don’t feel very uncomfortable in my own skin anymore, and the need to wash everything off me has gone away. This was more of me trying to get out something I’ve wanted to for years, but never really had an outlet to :’)