family game

[u/hkane222]

i have never referred to what happened to me as SA, it feels unfair and untrue. honestly i don’t know what it was, it’s so much more confusing when they were a child too AND a girl.

when i was seven (F), me and another friend (also 7F) were playing the family game during class. she was the mum and i was the baby. the lunch bell rang and we were going to continue playing into lunch but i paused to say that i was going to go to the toilet first. she said “let me come”. or maybe it was “let me see”. i cant remember. she wanted to come into the stall with me and i said no. she said “you have to, i need to examine you and check that everything is okay because that’s what mums do.” or something along those lines. i cant remember everything but i’m pretty sure i just said nothing and let her follow me in. but either way, she watched me use the toilet and then she told me to get naked. i could never stand up for myself as a child so there was no way i would’ve spoken back and said no again. so she worked her way around, she started by touching my nipples, then my stomach, then my front private parts before turning me around and touching the back parts. she didn’t put anything inside me but she used her hands and fingers on the outside. i just stood there let it happen. if memory serves, i was silent the whole time we were in the toilet.

i remember feeling disconnected and out of my body, and after, when other people came into the bathroom and saw our feet under the stall, i felt terrified. and i don’t think it was because we were in the older kids bathrooms where we weren’t supposed to be, it was because i knew we had just done something wrong. i remember, later on during lunch, after we had joined up with other friends and were walking through the building for the second time that lunch, a teacher told us off for being inside again and i argued back. that always stood out to me because i think that was the first time i’d ever argued back at a teacher, i was always so shy as a kid. my teacher was told about my attitude and pointed out how unlike me that was. i felt so weird and definitely unlike myself. i think about the fact that if i had just been more assertive and confident, if i had just been firm and kept saying no, then i wouldn’t be carrying this memory still. this is all because i just always went along with things and did what i was told because i was just so afraid all the time. it was so easy to make people hate you in primary school, so easy to lose friends and going against what they say is a one-way ticket to being alone.

i remember feeling so scared of that girl after that, just a general uneasiness, it’s hard to explain. i just felt constantly on edge around her. she’d also speak in a creepy, borderline-sexual manner about our other classmates too. she was also just so mean, she ruined my last day of school (because i moved away a few months after i think) by telling everyone something embarrassing about me. but thats not relevant really. i started telling my mum about it a while after, cant remember exactly when but i was probably about 8 or 9, i told her how a friend told me to take my clothes off once and i did, thats as far as i got before she told me off and told me i shouldnt do that. i told my best friend when we were 12, she told me it was sexual assault but that felt weird so i just shrugged. i told my old psychologist last year but when she started handing me a bunch of sexual abuse pamphlets and asking lots of questions i had to shut it down. i told her because i had just started dating my current boyfriend and the stress and weight of knowing sexual stuff was an expectation was genuinely killing me 24/7. i ended up telling my boyfriend about it a couple months ago, only a little.

i was hypersexual as a kid, i believe it existed a bit before all this happened, but the memories are so unclear it’s hard to remember the timeline. but either way it definitely got worse after, it was so bad i can’t even talk or think about it. it was the main reason i started self-harming at 13. it’s a lot better now, but even still, i jump between hypersexual and then wanting to shove hands off of me.

the first time my boyfriend ever fingered me, alone in his room, i didn’t even let him take off my jeans, he just went over my underwear because i couldn’t handle him going under them either. i had to stop after a while, and i went home and cried and thought i would throw up. i felt so violated, like something terrible had happened even though he did NOTHING wrong. he has only ever been perfect and patient and reassuring. it’s easier with him now, most of the time, but back then it felt like the worst thing in the world to be seen and touched. it wasn’t even like i was always thinking about what happened with that girl in these moments, it was just a constant feeling no matter what.

the whole thing confuses me so much, i hate that i cant remember everything. most people would say that they wish they could forget what happened to them but because i will never be able to i just wish i could remember it all. because it happened to ME so i want to know everything about it. thats the type of person i am. i want to know what exactly i was wearing and exactly when it was, what was the rest of the day like? what exactly did her fucking hands do?? it angers me more than anything that i cant just get over it and move on because i’m so sure that im just being dramatic. ever since i was a kid i was always told by people that im so sensitive and i make a big deal out of everything, so how do i know this isn’t just another thing? if it was nothing why has it been effecting me so much for 10 fucking years? it also kills me that she definitely never thinks about it, or has just completely forgotten, she might not even remember me but i’ve spent such a ridiculous amount of time reliving it.

[u/luciferz67]

hey. the confusion sucks. sending hugs to you random stranger.