Post Syndicated from Eevee original https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/21/i-am-thirty-eight-years-old/

There are several old, personal events that I’ve been rotating in my head for a very long time. I’m finally writing about them because I’ve just had the staggering realization that they all form one singular story. In some cases I’d never made the connection; in other cases I just plain forgot that things which happened within hours of each other were related.

This isn’t pleasant to write, and it won’t be pleasant to read. But I need it out of me.

I might have some of the details wrong, since I’m piecing together fragments from decades ago. This is a story, not a documentary. It’s about me, no one else.

content warning: underage sex; the active pursuit thereof by adults; bestiality mention.

I am five years old

My family moves from the UK (where my mother is from) to an American military base elsewhere (as my father is in the US military). In the switch from the UK to US school system, my parents push to have me put in second grade, on the grounds that I’ve been absorbing basically anything I’ve been exposed to since I was old enough to walk, and I’d be bored to tears in kindergarten.

This puts me two grades ahead for my age, which makes me two years younger than everyone around me, which will remain the case until I graduate from high school. I’m still quicker on the uptake than most everyone in my grade, and later get shifted a third year ahead in math. I never have school-age peers. This is normal.

I am eleven years old

I’m a picky eater. A lot of foods actively repulse me. My mother keeps making them for dinner anyway. I do my best to eat around them. Once she makes a quiche, and the taste of the cheddar makes me instantly want to vomit, so I can’t eat any of it. My father insists I sit at the table until I’m finished. I try a few bites but can’t bear it at all. I sit there for an hour, alone, before he gives up and lets me slink away.

---

I like computers. I don’t know much I can do with them besides toodle around in QBasic, but being able to write out instructions and have a thing happen feels like magic to me. I’m enamored. I’ll stay enamored for the rest of my life. I’m dimly aware that Windows and Office are also software, but they seem too incomprehensibly vast and complex to have been made, let alone made by fundamentally the same process I’m engaging in when I draw circles on the screen. I don’t consciously think about this, merely take for granted that they emerged fully-formed from a Company, which is somehow a different sort of entity from a person.

I think the Internet sounds cool but I don’t really know what there is to do on it besides download utilities I don’t need or read about The Microsoft Windows 95 Product Team! easter egg, which I only ever get to work once. I also find out that you can trick MS Paint into taking a screenshot of its own help window, which is cool because I don’t know how to take actual screenshots. That means I can make fake UIs, which is cool because I don’t know how to make real UIs, and I don’t know how to draw, either. Art, too, seems like some kind of foreign magic.

I’m really into Animorphs. I want to turn into a red-tailed hawk like Tobias and just fly away. I’m starting to do less well in school, and feel a budding hostility coming from my parents over it. I don’t have a lot of friends, don’t really have a sense of how to make them, and don’t think about it much. I feel a little out of place everywhere, but I always have, so it’s normal to me.

I hear about book 16, The Warning. It’s the one with Jake morphing into a rhino on the cover. I haven’t read it yet, but as I understand it, the plot centers around one of the protagonists typing “yeerk” or something into a search engine and finding exactly one result, which they then go investigate.

I think about this. I know about the Internet and search engines. But obviously, I think, entering “Yeerk” wouldn’t find anything, because Yeerks aren’t real. I try it anyway, just to see. I’m stunned to discover the world of fansites.

One of them has a forum and even a chat room attached. I join both and am stunned once more to discover that the Internet has other people on it, just hanging out. The other people are all teenagers, a little older than me, but I’m used to that. Half of them also have overbearing parents, and we bond over bitching about them. I can be kind of weird and awkward here and it’s fine. I’m really happy about having found this little sanctuary, and I start spending a lot more time online.

I am twelve or thirteen years old

I’m in ninth grade. My parents have put me in a private school, and it is fucking miserable. Homework is so tedious it feels akin to torture, so I just don’t do it, so my grades drop, so I get endlessly scolded and told I’m a disappointment. Chores, too, are agonizingly boring, and my mother regularly screams at me for not doing the dishes. None of the adults in my life — not parents, not teachers, not other school staff — suspect I have ADHD, perhaps because I’m smart and quiet, and I will eventually work it out myself some years later. Everyone else seems to believe their lecture will be the one to finally inspire me. My parents, who had once fought to save me from boredom, don’t recognize it happening in front of them.

I’m miserable at home from all the screaming, which makes me even more reclusive and less interested in school, which makes my grades all the more mediocre, which makes my parents yell more, which makes me more miserable.

Perhaps luckily, I don’t draw any conscious conclusions from any of this. I have no sense of how other people experience the world, and I haven’t really thought about, say, whether homework is easy for other people. I don’t even understand that I’m struggling, because I have nothing to compare it to. I don’t remember being a little kid very clearly, so as far as I can tell, it’s just always been like this. This is normal.

I have a little breakdown once and yell back at my mother, trying to convey… why I’m unhappy, without fully understanding it myself. She stands there, stunned. My father storms into the room, grabs me by my shirt collar, drags me upstairs to my bedroom, and throws me into it. He gets a utility knife and cuts through several random cables on my computer, then leaves without a word.

One of the cut cables is my keyboard, so to use my computer, I have to steal the keyboard from his computer and be sure to return it before he gets home and notices. Otherwise I would be completely isolated.

I learn a valuable lesson. Adults will hurt me, and this is normal. I hurt quite often, but I can’t do anything about it, and if I try, adults will hurt me more, so I just sit with it.

Sometimes I used to cry, but then my mother would hear and come tell me (in a caring voice) not to, because I’d give myself a headache. I took that to mean I just shouldn’t, so I’ve stopped.

My parents will later try to send me to a therapist a couple times — the problem is of course with me, not them, never them. I confide the encounter with my father, which makes it through some unseen grapevine, and I end up having to talk to some sort of military-HR person about it. Fearing that I might get put into the foster system and things will somehow end up worse, I lie that I had it coming. I hate lying, but I’ve learned that I have to lie to adults sometimes, so they won’t hurt me as much.

It isn’t mentioned again. My parents never say a word to me about it… until over a decade later, when my mother will tell me that I was physically imposing and physically threatened her. I will have no idea what she’s talking about — until that moment, the thought of attacking her in some way never crosses my mind. I’ll also be a late bloomer, insofar as I’ll bloom at all, and one of the few strong images I’ll remember from that day will be my mother looking down at me. But she will remain absolutely convinced that I was a threat, and that is why my father took the therefore-fully-justified actions he did, and I will be unable to disabuse her of this notion up through the end of her life. One day, many years later, she will die of cancer, having never believed me about my own motivations.

She will also, in the same conversation, chide me for not doing the dishes. I will be almost thirty years old.

I am fourteen years old

I’m in tenth grade, taking AP calculus. I’m good at it, but the homework is still mindnumbing.

I try to coast through my own life, attracting as little attention as possible from the adults around me who have the power to hurt me. I’m not fully successful. But when I’m hurt, it’s normal.

---

I’m still online a lot. I’ve gotten into doing, well, “web stuff”. It started out with posting little JavaScript snippets onto a small forum that doesn’t strip it out, or using a lot of <font> tags to make rainbow text. I’ve also gotten into Pokémon, and I feel a strong affection for tables and lists, so I start to make a Pokédex website. I don’t really know what I’m doing, and much of the effort comes from painstakingly retyping information from strategy guides or just other people’s websites, a process my future self will find comically rudimentary in hindsight. But it still feels like magic, and now I can share it with other people, too. I don’t know if anyone uses my website, but I’m delighted to have made it.

I’ve also hit puberty — several grades after everyone else, which has been a little awkward — and am starting to hear about this “sex” thing. It sounds pretty interesting. I end up combining my interests and joining an IRC channel dedicated to Pokémon porn. I’m probably the youngest person here, but no one cares, and I have no sense that there’s any reason anyone would care. There are some older teenagers here, as well as some adults, ranging all the way up to one 40-year-old — but he’s a completely regular cheerful guy who just genuinely enjoys writing fics about Sabrina having sex with an Alakazam or whatever.

But there’s also a guy who makes the occasional comment about “little girls”. There are at least one or two people who casually mention they have regular sex with their dogs. No one bats an eye at this, so I don’t, either. I have no basis for comparison, because I am fourteen years old. Maybe this is normal. Everyone else acts like it’s normal. It must be normal.

Sometimes people try to have cybersex with me. I’m not very good at it. I don’t really know anything about sex, but I start to pick it up from how other people describe it. It’s fun to write about this thing I’ve never done, this activity so mysterious that it almost feels like it must itself be fictional. It feels like it only exists in a bubble, completely detached from normal life.

---

Offline, I still barely know anyone. I’ve sort of gravitated to a couple other nerds at school, but outside of the fact that we are all vaguely aware how to make a website, we don’t have a lot in common. One of them is just kind of mean, even. This is normal. I’m two years into high school and just barely hitting the age when most people are starting it. I live in Hawai‘i at the moment, and almost everyone else has lived here their whole lives, but I’ve never even been to the same school for more than two years.

I find out about a little old-school website where furries can enter their location and find other furries nearby. I put in my zip code. Nobody else, it seems, lives in Hawai‘i.

I am still fourteen years old

We move, for the fourth time in my life, this time to the US mainland.

I update my zip code on the furry location website. Still nothing.

But then, out of nowhere, I get a message from someone I don’t know, who I’ll call 🐨. He’s eighteen, four years older than me, but that’s normal. He says he used to live in my town and he’s passing through for just a day or two, and would I like to meet up? I’m fucking ecstatic and say yes.

My mother drives me to where he’s staying. It has that 1970s wood panelling everywhere, which I might be seeing for the first time. It ultimately leaves me with a strange, otherworldly impression.

We talk a bit, and then he clearly wants to have sex. This hadn’t come up in our brief conversations beforehand. He seems surprised, but unswayed, that I haven’t had sex before. I don’t see any reason to turn him down — sex is supposed to be The Best Thing, after all.

We fool around some. It’s… fine. I don’t really like how he touches me. But hurting is normal, and this barely hurts at all, so I don’t say anything. I don’t even know how to say anything. People don’t show much interest in what I want. If anything, what I want seems to be an inconvenience to everyone else.

So I don’t say anything. It’s fine. This is normal.

Things peter out. I go home.

I’m no longer a virgin. It seems like something should be different. But nothing is. I don’t really think about it.

I try to keep in touch with 🐨, but he isn’t around much. He’s part of a little group of furries who all live in the same town and know each other, though, and they start to reach out, and I talk to some of them.

I am sixteen years old

[Hello, future Eevee here. Just letting you know, this is your last chance to back out. –ev]

I’ve just graduated high school. I’m so close to being away from my parents, to living on a college campus in a distant state. It’s exhilarating, but also terrifying, because I don’t really know how to live on my own. I’ve never done laundry or bought my own food. I don’t have a car or much money. I don’t really know how to do anything, other than make websites that look like they were made by a sixteen-year-old.

Over the past couple years, a number of guys have shown sexual interest in me. Almost all of them have been eighteen or older. I’ve met some of them at furry conventions and had sex with them. I didn’t really like any of it. But I’m desperately starved for affection and still assume the problem is with me, so I keep taking any opportunity I’m given. Maybe the next time will be better? I don’t know what else to do, so I keep doing what I’m doing.

I’m sufficiently self-aware of this inner turmoil to post about it. The only relevant comment I get is from someone I do not know and never otherwise speak to.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with giving it up for whoever wants it, especially at your age!

I am sixteen years old. This is normal. It can only be normal. No one else thinks anything of it, so I don’t either.

I attend another furry convention not long before I’m to move into a college dorm. My family’s situation is a little complicated at the moment — the house has been sold, my mother is in an apartment in our old town, my father is in an apartment in the new town, I’m off to a convention, and somehow this is all intended to coalesce later.

I have two sexual encounters that have… ramifications.

---

One is with 🐯, who I met somehow-or-other through 🐨’s group, despite not being local to them. [I have no memory whatsoever of how we met, why we started talking, or what we talked about. –ev]

He is twenty-six years old, a full decade my elder. He is openly interested in me because I’m underage. This is normal. After all, I am underage, and most of the people capable of travel are adults, so anyone who would have sex with me would at the very least have to find it acceptable that I’m underage.

We meet up at this con. He has sex with me. As usual, I don’t really know why I’m participating.

It’s the worst sex I will ever have in my life, deeply unpleasant and uncomfortable. I spend every single moment of it desperately wishing for it to be over, but I don’t know how to ask him to stop. I expect people to hurt me if I push back against what they want from me, but I’m not even cognizant of this — I see myself as just wanting to make people happy. Eventually I can’t take it any more and, in a flash of inspiration, offer to fellate him instead. I don’t really care for that, either, but it’s much less bad.

He gets me to promise I won’t tell anyone. I’m vaguely aware that this is the sort of thing he shouldn’t be doing, and I don’t want anyone in trouble on my behalf, so I agree.

---

There’s also 🐸, who I’m at least acquainted with, though we’re not exactly close. We hang out in a couple of the same IRC channels and have friends in common. Also, we’re the same age, almost exactly — we were born in the same month.

We also meet up and have sex. This time, at least, it seems like sort of maybe a good idea. At least it’s someone I know. It’s not great, but it’s not nightmarish, either.

He leaves his phone in my hotel room. I happen to catch a glance of him a little later, and so I run up to him to return his phone.

His father is with him, and is furious. He’s absolutely convinced I’m some kind of sex predator, despite that we’re exactly the same age and I look younger than 🐸. I go for my wallet but he sense my intentions and angrily insists he doesn’t care what kind of ID I have. He declares he’s placing me under citizen’s arrest, a thing I’ve never even heard of. But of course, I believe I have to go along with adults, or they’ll make things even worse.

He actually calls the police, who spend about two seconds checking my ID and say “yeah this is fine”. But then they want me to Make A Statement Down At The Station, so I go there, and I awkwardly describe a bland teenaged sexual encounter to someone who is a remarkably slow typist considering it seems to be their whole job.

And now I’m at a police station, and the police only want to release me into my parents’ custody, because I am sixteen years old. So they call my father, who is thankfully only a few hours’ drive away. And they put me in a chair and tell me that if I get up they’ll lock me in a cell. And I sit there, for two hours, while cops twenty feet away crack jokes with each other about the fact that two teenagers fucked. It may have been more or less than two hours, but I have undiagnosed ADHD, which has a way of stretching out activies like sitting in a chair doing nothing.

My father arrives, so silently furious that he accidentally drives into the wrong state on the way back to his apartment. He demands I log into my laptop, and he changes my password. Once I’m alone, because he’s off at his job as some sort of network administrator, I log into my laptop as admin, and change my password back. [Bright spot in this story. Fucking hilarious. Great job, li’l Eevee. –ev]

I then write a public post about the experience, which ends up linked on a now-defunct drama site. A bunch of people — who are we kidding here, more adult men — have a grand laugh about, again, two teenagers having sex. It probably doesn’t help that the post is written in an almost painfully cutesy affect, since I am sixteen years old. Several dramamongers approach me personally to be nasty, including one who calls me a “sick fuck” for “doing kids”. I am sixteen years old.

One of the convention staff also emails me with a brief rant, asking why I’m trying to destroy the convention by writing about things that happened to me, because now he’s fielding accusations that the con is full of pedophiles (presumably, again, because I had sex with someone my age). I have no idea what to say to this and never reply.

I do show it to 🐯, hoping for support. I happen to think that it’s absurd to blame someone for posting that they had sex at a con. But 🐯 insists I’m wrong and should apologize. I deflate.

My father later talks to me about the event. The conversation is extremely one-sided, because I know what happens if I push back against anything. He tells me I’m cold, calculating, manipulative, evil. He tells me I care only about myself. That I have no soul. That he doesn’t want me in the house.

I am sixteen years old.

All of this is normal.

---

The irony is, unfortunately, lost on me — because as requested, I erased mention of 🐯, the twenty-six-year-old who had sex with a sixteen-year-old, from my story. I erased it so thoroughly that I will forget these two encounters happened on the same weekend until many years later, even as I will continue to be lightly haunted by a memory of horrendous sex I felt trapped in.

Sometime in the next week and a half, I admit to someone that I had sex with 🐯. [I don’t know who, but I think I was pointedly asked, and I didn’t really know how to reject questions, and I’ve never liked lying, so I can extremely see how I would end up just saying it. –ev]

This makes it through some unseen grapevine, and suddenly 🐯 is furious with me, threatening to end the friendship [lol –ev] unless I fix it somehow, by convincingly lying to someone in this gossip chain that I don’t know. I make a half-hearted attempt, which I hate, and am (unsurprisingly) not believed.

Our relationship, such as it is, deteriorates, both because 🐯 himself deteriorates and because I don’t seem to have as much interest in trying to be friends with the person I had inescapable nightmare sex with. I must feel resentful of him without ever wanting to confront him directly, because I will later discover a few remaining scraps of one of our last conversations:

🐯: Gods eevee you’ve become such an annoying little bitch, I can’t beleive I was ever even nice to you. I wouldn’t have come within 20 feet of you had I known you were this kind of person.

I am sixteen years old. I am being spoken to by a twenty-six-year-old man.

🐯: gods, you and your stupid faces

I am sixteen years old, and I use emotes as punctuation o.o to a ridiculous degree ^o.o^ like multiple times per line o.o and the twenty-six-year-old man who was so eager to have sex with me is now sick to death of how juvenile I am. If only there were some way he could have foreseen this.

I am sixteen years old, but I begin to realize I do not give a shit about this loser who can only bed teenagers, nor about his big important opinion of me. He’s mad at me, but it doesn’t matter. Adults have been mad at me my entire life. What’s he going to do, type at me? I glaze over. I become laminated. I rebuff everything.

He only talks to me once more, to say he misses seeing me around. I don’t care.

I am sixteen years old. I start to wonder if this isn’t normal.

I am eighteen years old

Someone new joins the Pokémon porn IRC channel. They are fifteen years old. I don’t think anything of it, just as no one thought anything of it when I first entered. This is normal. Sort of.

I recognize their name from the artwork that decorates several Pokémon fansites. I find it fascinating that they were able to create any of that. It’s like magic to me.

There are a few artists here already, but this is the first whose art was truly captivating to me. Somehow it feels more impressive yet also more real, like I can believe it was done by a person. It plants the tiniest seed that maybe, one day, I can do it too.

I approach them to say hi, that I like their art. We have an actual conversation, then another. It’s like a breath of fresh air. So many people I’ve talked to have just wanted to hit on me way past the point of comfort and barely have a personality beyond that. But nothing like that happens here.

Instead we talk about actual things: Pokémon, and art, and our lives, and all the wrinkles they’ve had so far. They like cats. I like puzzles. Sometimes they struggle with pressure from overbearing commissioners, and something about that must resonate with me, so I try to be supportive. Later I’ll admit I’m still struggling with affection and my inability to tell people no, and they’ll be supportive of me, too.

It’s nice.

One day, it’ll even be normal.

I am thirty-two years old

I’m at the DMV. My best friend, someone I met a lifetime ago — in a Pokémon porn chat, of all places! — is here with me.

We live together, now, with our five cats, and we’ve recently escaped someone we both struggled to push back against. It feels like a small victory, but it was hard-earned.

We both sign the marriage certificate.

I am thirty-eight years old

I’m thinking back on a lot of things. It’s almost dizzying to see so many little threads of causality. My parents, even teachers, practically training me to think that whatever other people want is paramount. The deeply fucked-up culture of early-00’s Internet, where people could just openly announce their interest in doing sex crimes and no one batted an eye. Even the notion of a 14yo in a space dedicated to porn sounds unthinkable by today’s standards, but I poked my head in a lot of sex-themed places back in the day and not one of them cared how old I was.

I suppose I was well-spoken enough to sound older (aside from the hailstorm of o.o), but at the same time my social development was… almost non-existent. Hence how I had 20-somethings talking to me like I was an equal, all while I didn’t even understand how to say “I don’t like this”.

It took me a few more years to extricate myself from the weird little rut I’d dug for myself. It certainly helped that, around nineteen or twenty, vastly fewer random older men were interested in me. I’ll just, uh, try not to think too hard about that.

I don’t know what would have helped me avoid this. I keep thinking back to the vague ambient warnings about the Internet in the early 00s, which mainly focused on how anyone might be lying to you, might be pretending to be your age to trick you into sex later.

But that never happened to me. It was so unlike my experience that it almost feels laughable. Everyone I had sex with was pretty open that they wanted to have sex with me, and I agreed. No one ever warned me that sex without pretense could have emotional consequences. Everything in my (regular, offline) life that tried to tell me anything about sex was laser-focused on either pregnancy, STIs, or a guy in a van offering me candy. Like, hello, I was a deeply lonely sixteen-year-old. They didn’t need to offer me candy. They just offered me sex!

And there are lingering consequences — although now that I’m happily married and no longer on the radar of a bunch of people who really want to sleep with a teenager, they largely don’t matter in practice. But I had so much terrible, uncaring sex with men that I feel a little anxious even considering the thought of doing it again. There’s no one besides my spouse who I want to have sex with at the moment, but I still don’t like having that stuck in me. Like a shackle around my ankle that isn’t chained to anything, but it’s still there, and occasionally I feel it rattle.

---

But what really struck me, what really compelled me to write this down, was the realization of a strange pattern in the post-con sequence of events.

I think it’s fair to say that 🐯 used me for sex. I played along, but I think there’s at least a little bit of a responsibility gradient here.

But then, wait. Some group of people confirmed with me that I’d had sex with 🐯, and then I guess started gossipping about it, possibly even harassing him. Do you know how many people from that circle reached out to me, to see how I was doing?

Zero. Nada. I was useful only as long as it took to crystallize a nugget of Drama™, and then I was no longer needed.

So let me recap, this time with some editorializing:

• A man ten years my elder used me for sex.
• A bunch of adult men used me for laughs.
• Some kind of gossip ring used me for, well, gossip.
• A con staff member used me to vent about something that, frankly, furry conventions seemed to deal with a lot in the 00s.

Not one of these many adults reached out to see if I was okay. The con staff guy didn’t know about 🐯, of course, but they did know I’d had a harrowing experience and now was having at least one more — because those are what my whole fucking post was about! — and yet the only reason they went through the effort to find my email and reach out was to blame me for it again.

But it’s the gossip ring that I truly cannot excuse. The sole reason there was any gossip to be had at all was the idea that a twenty-six-year-old having sex with a sixteen-year-old is, in some sense, bad. But this clearly didn’t actually mean anything to them! It was “bad” only in the abstract, “bad” only in the sense that it gave them an excuse to ostracize the “bad” person, or laugh, or whatever the fuck they were doing.

It’s no different than that drama-site clown calling me a “sick fuck for doing kids” or whatever the hell. You could not possibly read a post about how I had to wait for my dad to pick me up because the cops wouldn’t release a minor and not grasp that I am a minor. Like, I AM “THE KIDS”! You, my fucking guy, right now, are being cruel towards the people you’re feigning concern for! But it just didn’t matter what happened or who was involved or who was hurt by it. Some asshole — almost certainly yet another adult — just wanted to be nasty, and they thought they saw someone they were allowed to be nasty to, so they were.

None of these people were interested in helping a sixteen-year-old. They only wanted to lash out at someone. The best I got was a tiny apology from 🐯, of all fucking people, who eventually caught on that I had not fully enjoyed our time together. But he can, of course, shove that entirely up his ass.

---

For many, many years, I’ve avoided making any mention of the thing with 🐸, my first exposure to the Internet “Drama” Circuit. I feared it would happen again, or that I’d be called a pedophile some more by people who just conveniently forget that we were the same age. I’d completely forgotten that 🐯 happened at the same time — because he’d basically asked me to detach him from the rest of it! Rediscovering that little tidbit has sure cast this story in a different light.

But like, fuck that, regardless? I will talk about my own life in whatever goddamn way I please. As soon as I decided to write this down, I couldn’t even remember why I’d ever been scared to do it. I guess I had been pretty thoroughly punished for writing it down the first time.

And sure, with decades’ worth of hindsight, it was perhaps not a good idea to have described my underage sex life — or the brief entanglement of the police with it — in public. But I still reject the idea that it was wrong to do so, or that any subsequent ragging on the convention was my fault. The actual story here (once 🐯 was stripped from it) was that Some Fucking Guy overreacted and called the cops because his teenaged kid got laid and he didn’t like that. That is fucking bananas behavior for a grown-ass man, but somehow fingers ended up pointed at literally everyone else. Clown world.

---

And various people have been calling me a pedophile ever since anyway. I’m often not privy to why. Like, as best as I could discern, the Something Awful Pokémon crowd branded me a pedo at one point because I had some cutesy, non-sexual, unremarkable artwork of myself (i.e., an Eevee person) as the background of my website for a while. Like that’s it, that’s the whole thing. Conspicuously, I am not attracted to, or otherwise interested in, teenagers or children, but that just doesn’t seem to factor in. You’d think it would be kind of important, right? But there’s this weird chain of semantic implications that lets you suggest someone actively molests children based purely on vibes, without ever having to identify any concrete child, and that seems kind of bad to me, but if I try to explain it I’ll probably be called a pedophile, because why would anyone but a pedophile defend pedophiles by nitpicking the definition of “pedophile”, huh?

Meanwhile, I was actively pursued by much older adults! 🐯 isn’t even the oldest guy who had sex with me when I was sixteen! But I’ve spent half a lifetime nervous about even admitting that, out of some nebulous fear of the reaction, all while I get lumped in with the sort of people who did it to me because my website background doesn’t have a suit and tie or what the fuck ever. What a joke.

It makes me feel fucking crazy, sometimes, to watch our culture obsess over rooting out anyone with a whiff of “pursues sex with a minor” with the same furor and accuracy as we once rooted out people possessed by Satan, but with “the minor” — a person — reduced to a sort of… fantasy hypothetical? Or just dropped entirely, I guess. “Pedophile” is the thing you call someone that makes you win, because that’s the worst thing, and they can’t prove you wrong. Even the richest man in the world does it.

Sometimes I think about what might happen in another timeline, where I’m sixteen now and I post this story. I’m sure 🐯 would be absolutely roasted right off the Internet — but how many people would still check on me for anything other than more sordid details?

…But then, who have I checked on? How many times have I had the opportunity, and not taken it?

I can definitely think of one or two. But that’s a whole other rabbit hole.

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This sucks. I feel like basically every adult in my teenaged life let me down, and I have no idea what to do with that information.

I guess all I can do is try to reach back in time with the power of blogging and say what I desperately needed to hear.

If you are a teenager reading this — I don’t know how or why, but I am functionally powerless to stop you — and even a little bit of it has resonated with you, then let me impress upon you this: how you feel matters. Even if it doesn’t seem to matter to the people around you, the people with power over your life, it should still matter to you. Hold onto it, even if you have to hide it, and do not let go for anyone.

I’m sorry for whatever you may feel trapped in. I’m sorry if it’s hard. It might keep being hard for a little while. But if you keep looking, you will find people who care about what you want, who will have your back when you struggle to stand up for yourself, and who won’t punish you for hurting.

Please take care of yourself.

P.S.: Sex is an amplifier, not an automatic good time. It’s like Mario Party: a hilarious chaotic mess with the right people, but a horrible fucking slog with the wrong people.

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I am thirty-eight years old.

I still think about what happened to me when I was sixteen. Not all the time. But sometimes.

Maybe after today, I can finally stop.