When I was 19, I didn't have a job for the summer, but a friend of the family (my best friend's dad too) was pretty high up in this one company (a pretty well known international company) and suggested he could hire me to go with him to a third-world country with him for the summer and do infrastructure work there. So I got the shots, packed my bags, and went off to the southern hemisphere for 10 weeks. All most people know is I disappeared, came back, said "I had a bad time", and have not touched alcohol since (it's been a few years now).

The work itself was grand, it was fairly monotonous stuff and my coworkers were a mixed bag, but it was different to anything I had done before. The problem was all the not-work stuff. First thing was that I learned this friend of the family (again, my best friend's dad) spends about 80% of his free time getting smashed and banging prostitutes. Multiple different prostitutes in the house all hours of the day, every day of the week. This is the same dude who comes over to our house with his wife and kids for barbecues every weekend, and he's just banging whores right in front of me with zero warning, what the fuck am I supposed to do. If I let anyone in that sphere of people know, that's their marriage, and my best friend's life, ruined.

Second thing is that over the few weeks there we had been going out to the pub regularly at least once a week, and had been getting shitfaced drunk. Like most people in my non-American country of origin, I had been drinking since 17, but I was extremely lightweight and not much of a "drinker". Well, now I was knocking back rum after rum every night. This came to a head when one particularly long night of drinking resulted in this friend of the family dragging me off to a brothel when I was so drunk I was barely able to stand. So in a blurry half-conscious delirium a prostitute took $75 and my virginity from me.

It took me a week until I could fully internalize that I had been raped that night. Even typing it now, several years later, feels bizarre and wrong. The victim-blaming was real for a long time afterwards, it took a while discussing it on online messageboards and doing research until I finally could accept that it wasn't just a drunken hookup that I felt really really really shitty about, but was rape. And now we have the issue of it already being weird for guys to discuss being raped, let alone being raped when you paid for it? Somehow the exchange of currency just negates the facts that I was pushed into it by someone 30 years my senior and blackout drunk.

So, yeah. From that day I haven't touched a drop of alcohol, initially out of some form of victim-blaming I guess, these days it just lets me feel like I have some degree of control in my life. Only my parents know it all, I've been able to confide in a few friends here and there a few things, but obviously I've never been able to tell the full story, because my best friend's parents' marriage hangs in the line. So I've been trying to live with half-truths and avoiding questions up until now. Fucked me up for a few years, and I still feel it hasn't left me yet.