This is going to be a very very long one so I’m gonna break it up into parts. I hope you’ll have time to out of your day to stick around and read some of them. I would greatly appreciate.
There’s something that happened to me that I haven’t been able to actually express fully. Like I’ve told strangers bits about it online here and there. But I just want someone to see everything that I have to say about it and listen. I think the last time I did talk about my experience with grooming online, someone blamed me for going through that, saying it was my fault for letting that person control me. Because I always used to preach about staying away from pedophiles and weirdos online. But during that time, I had learned not all groomers are like 30 year old creepy men. Some are charming and some are really young.
And after that person said it was my fault, I iisy fell apart completely. All the feelings came back to me, the shame, the guilt. The inappropriate conversations I’ve engaged in. It made me sick and that morning I nearly passed out from stress. And the worst part was that it was in a community filled with all kinds of mean people so I had little to no backup. I really thought it was my fault and it hurt.
But some more time passed and I become more and more at peace with what happened. Every now and then I think about it and I feel dirty, like I want to erase what had already happened. But I’ve learned a few things from that experience even if it was unpleasant and a nightmare.
But I want to start with how I met this person online. I was about 15 and as for him he was 19 years old. We’ll just call him Apricot. Concealing his identity in case he somehow finds me, but I also have somewhat an aversion to his real name too because of the experience, which I kind of feel ashamed about because its a pretty common ethnic name.
Anyways we met on a venting app. He liked my username because he thought it was cute. It was my go to username for a lot of things and I felt flattered that someone like it.
They came to me with a lot of trauma the first couple of times we chatted. Apricot saw that I had commented and offered support to others. And I was willing to help. We moved to tumblr where we chatted for a bit and then stopped for a while.
After I had lost what little online support I had. I turned to him, he texted me first actually and I decided to establish a friendship. Because we both like gothic things, gore, and anime.
We then moved to Instagram where the majority of stuff took place. What was unique about the situation though was that early on, he admitted that he liked younger girls. Last girl he dated was 15 while he was 18. At the time I didn’t think much of it since I see relationship dynamics like that at school all the time. It was a shorter age gap compared to like a 12 year old and like a 25 year old.
I wanted to be the one that was the most accepting and understanding. It’s what I always strived to do. We had long convos and things were going great until he told me that I had to be careful because he might accidentally fall in love with me. Mostly because he felt I was really nice and caring. And I was like, don’t worry about! I actually felt flattered by it.
But… then I became somewhat infatuated with him. After a while I realize that I just loved the attention and validation, I didn’t actually love him. I was a social awkward kid, no friends, no one had any romantic interest in me. I felt horrible. This person came in and made me feel like I mattered and I was special.
He then confessed something to me and I believe this is where everything to a turn for the absolute worst. He told me that he had sexual fantasies about me sometimes. And during that time, it made me happy because I was super hormonal and I had a lot of nsfw thoughts running around in my brain too.
I told him that I felt the same way, and we started talking what he wanted to do to me. I didn’t really think about pursuing a relationship for a little bit mostly because he told me that he never wanted to date again. I thought it would just be fun to be sexual with him because never in my life have I felt wanted by anyone. I just wanted someone to tell me how attractive or tempting I was.
More in part 2 which will be up later…