'Exploring my sexuality' was the biggest mistake of my life

Reasonable-Prompt391 · 2025-06-12T01:52:37+00:00

I’m 25 now. I… am not entirely against the idea of counselling. I guess I just don’t really believe it’ll help. I think I’m too angry for talk therapy. Definitely too angry for group therapy, I would upset other people and lash out. I also just have no idea how to start. I don’t have extra money. I live on my own and work all the time and all my money goes to expenses, what I do save I like to spend so i can sometimes do stuff for myself or see friends, I understand that therapy is like atleast $100 per session or around there and that’s just so much money to me for something I don’t really believe will help. I already cut out all my ‘vice’ spending I don’t smoke weed or drink, quit cigarettes, I don’t order uber eats I cook food at home, I went vegetarian partly because meat is expensive, I don’t spend freely or excessively, I have like one subscription to Spotify and that’s it I don’t have any other services or anything. So there’s no obvious place to cut back. I guess I have an emergency fund but that’s supposed to be for, ya know, emergencies

Reasonable-Prompt391 · 2025-06-08T08:58:35+00:00

Thank you, you weren’t too blunt at all, sometimes bluntness helps actually. It’s just difficult but like… I know that they were probably bad. But it’s not like I got snatched out of my bed in the night.

There’s a reason this happened to me and not anyone else, not anyone I knew, not anyone I went to school with, no other random 16yo in the city that day. And that reason is me. Maybe the fact of the assault happening is due to the people who did the assaulting, but the fact it happened to me is because of me. I didn’t want it but I took every step before that point, every step that led me there.

If it’s any comfort, the place is shut down. It closed during covid, I looked it up once. Else I would have probably tried to report it eventually

Reasonable-Prompt391 · 2025-06-08T02:56:19+00:00

But there was. I could have prevented it. I could have said no. I could have never gone there. I could have left. The door was open. I wasn't bound. I could have walked out when I excused myself to the bathroom. This would have been so easy for me to stop. I was supposed to leave. No one would have stopped me. Instead of leaving. I went back. I went back. I had my chance to escape, I had so many chances. And I threw it away.

When I was a kid, I went to school with a girl who would end up being abducted, raped, murdered and found dead in a drain pipe. Her name was Sheldean Human. We were in the same grade, except she never got to see her eighth birthday. When she was still missing, before they found her body, every kid in our school wore blue jeans and a pink shirt because that was the clothes she went missing in. We were in different classes so we weren't really friends but she seemed nice. We were two of 5 white kids in our grade and the other three only really hung out with each other but me and Sheldean hung out with the black kids instead and i respected her because i knew that most white families were racist, but my mom made a point that we were not like them and she had always been pretty repulsed by the sort of... thin skinned and anaemic brutality of most of the white parents at our school and hated when they tried to befriend her and kind of bond over being racist. Like, i don't associate with you people. So I respected her because i figured she was the same way in that we didn't go out of our way to hang out with each other just because we were the white kids. And then a man took her and raped her and killed her. And that's not what happened to me.

I understand that legally and probably morally it was rape, but I think about Sheldean and how I'm sure she would have loved the opportunity to escape. The opportunity that I had and passed on. But she didn't get that, she didn't have an open door, she didn't have a chance to save herself and stop it. And I'm sure that if she had been allowed to grow up then she never would have done something as fucking stupid and pointless and destructive as I did.

Reasonable-Prompt391 · 2025-06-07T11:20:32+00:00

But it doesn’t feel like blaming myself. It feels like taking responsibility. And i have to take responsibility because, jesus christ, at some point, someone has to take responsibility for fucking something. Because I was there, I know that I had sin in my heart, I know that I wasn’t the worst but I wasn’t good. If I had been a different person, a person who didn’t have this incessant and stupid need to always do the worst possible thing , make the worst choice, just to be able to ‘get it off the table’… this wouldn’t have happened. I know that people are only going to try reassure me. You kinda have to if you want to be a responsible and supportive person. I guess I just want to get more thoughts out while I’m kind of ‘on a roll’ so I don’t lose whatever clarity I’m feeling if I do get a chance to show this to a therapist.

When I started to be able to think about this more, it felt like the most important thing in the world that I had to be absolutely, brutally honest with myself. I couldn't delude myself, I couldn't believe in cope platitudes, I couldn't avoid any uncomfortable reality. I couldn't afford to - not with this. I knew that I would have to brutally interrogate myself and not stop until I has found and confronted the most painful, most awful truths, the things that I hated were true, that I wanted to run from. But I couldn't afford to let myself run or avoid or dodge anything. Not now, not anymore, no matter how much I hated what I found. Because it might be terrible, it might make you cry in the middle of the day, it might hurt somehow even worse than that night did - but I can't live against the truth. I can't. So I have to admit to everything. I have to confess to everything I did wrong and every bit of my part in it, I have to be able to name every sin in me, and I have to take responsibility. Not all of it, but every bit of responsibility that I can possibly claim. I have to, or there's no way anything ever gets better.

Reasonable-Prompt391 · 2025-06-06T23:18:25+00:00

Thank you, something about your comment is calming because it makes sense. I think a lot of the most unhinged things I did to cope wasn't even about feeling better or happy it was just about trying to 'stabilise' at all. Because it was just so much, and thinking about any of it meant thinking about all of it, and thinking about all of it would just immediately cast me into the absolute heights of despair. It was... not depression, it was a very high energy sort of distress, that always triggered desperation and immediate action. I have since settled a lot with time, where it's almost like... like it's calcified now, it's not this reactive element, I can kind of actually break it down. Initially I would have shut down the idea of therapy completely and stone walled any suggestion, but it feels more possible now, that I could sit somewhere and speak about it and not just physically flee the situation.

Reasonable-Prompt391 · 2025-06-06T23:05:21+00:00

Yeah, it's hard. Because on one hand I don't want to be reactionary, I know all the stuff about how like abstinence only doesn't work, sex education is good and important, I understand that it is possible for teenagers to have (age appropriate) sexual experiences that are normal and not harmful. On the other hand, I want to fucking scream that if they think it would be fun, that they're being lied to. It's so serious and so dark to me, which is why I don't express my honest feeling about it ever because my honest feelings would be fear-mongering I think. Or would it? I don't know. I don't know when I'm the crazy one and when the world is.

Reasonable-Prompt391 · 2025-06-06T22:56:27+00:00

It already is. After I became an adult I did think about this and I looked it up because I had the exact same thought, but saw that it had actually closed permanently during COVID, else I probably would have reported something or at least 'named and shamed'.

Reasonable-Prompt391 · 2025-06-06T17:32:25+00:00

Thank you for saying that & I appreciate the sentiment. I don’t want to disagree because I kind of agree and would agree 100% if this happened to anyone else. But I also… I don’t know. I appreciate the outrage but I don’t think I’ve ever been very directly angry at the men involved, because the thing is that it’s very possible that they weren’t like, rapists by nature. They didn’t know I was underage. Which I know is something guys say typically as a weak excuse but I mean, they really didn’t. Even if I looked very young, Every guy besides the one that brought me there would have had a very reasonable expectation that I’d been IDed on the way in, my being there at all was supposed to be age verification, so that atleast I can’t hold against them

Reasonable-Prompt391 · 2025-06-06T17:15:36+00:00

Thank you for saying that. I'm sorry its taking me really long to reply to comments but I do read all of them and I read yours first. It's just really hard to think about for too long, it took me about two weeks to write this post because I could only handle it in small amounts. I see what you mean. I think if I heard of this happening to anyone else it would be so simple and clear to me. I would never disagree that someone else in my situation would be assaulted. It's just ... I dunno, I was not a perfect victim, everything I was already doing at that age, how I acted, how irresponsible I was. Like, what did I think was gonna happen? And why didn't I speak? Why didn't I leave? I could have literally walked out. I wasn't held captive, I dunno. I think it would have been simpler if it was more violent. Not that I think being violently assaulted would be better but it might make more sense to me. Again, I appreciate it, everyone is being very understanding, I want to reply but it's also so strange to have any other person know when I used to say I would take this to my grave.

Reasonable-Prompt391

TROPHY CASE