WARNING: Triggering Content regarding sexual assault to a minor, sexual harassment, and suicide ideations.

When I am surrounded by people, I love to hear their ideas, their stories, and their perspective. But very rarely am I good at sharing my ideas, my stories and my perspective. I always thought it’s my depression that keeps my mind from remembering a story to talk about or my neurodivergence that causes me to communicate differently, but the truth is I don’t like most of my stories. They aren’t entertaining, their sad and depressing. And most of the time, their isn’t anything to learn from them except how inept I am at making decisions that make me happy. I was also taught to lie and never speak about what has happened to me, which drives an internal fear and keeps me from really speaking about my life. And now, as I get older, I remember things that have happened to me and I question their validity. I don’t know if anything I am about to speak about is true or not, but it feels true and I deserve a space to talk about it.

I was young at this time, living in a trailer that was adjacent to a motel that my mom and nana ran at the time. My mom was friends with a lot of people at the time who stayed there, and a good portion of them were on drugs in one way or another. There was this couple that lived in one of the rooms at the motel, and I visited them every now and then while my mom worked in a different city and my Nana was busy working the front. Since the motel was in front of our trailer, the entire place was a roaming ground for me and my siblings to play and explore, and since everyone who stayed there was friends with my mom, no one was a stranger and we felt pretty comfortable around all of them. One day, I overheard something happening in one of the rooms and I walked over to see what had happened. I didn’t see the man of the couple around, but I did see the woman. The mattress they shared was against the back wall to the right of the room and the entire place was a mess, but I felt comfortable around this person so as I spoke to them, I ended up laying in their bed next to this person. They talked about a lot and mentioned something about not wanting sex and when I asked what it was, they started explaining it to me. But then, they got really emotional and started cuddling me, and I was so young so I didn’t know what was going on or why I stayed, but I did. Then, they unzipped my pants and started grinding on my penis. Now, I don’t really remember too much about the whole interaction or how long it lasted, but I remembered that I was scared and peed a little bit and they stopped after that. I didn’t speak about it to anyone at first because I was so scared and confused about what had happened, but then our school had an assembly that talked about stranger danger, briefly went over some scary scenarios, and said “if anything like this has happened to you, tell your parents or teachers”. I remembered going home, sitting on the couch in the living room which faced the front door, and waiting for my mom to come home. When she did, she asked about the day and all of my siblings talked about the assembly. After they spoke, I nervously told my mom that I think something like this happened to me. I don’t think I went into much detail because I was afraid of getting into trouble, but I told her the name of the woman and in the middle of me explaining it, I remembered a couple different responses. The first response was thinking I was saying this to get attention and I was being dramatic, and later afterwards I remembered her saying that I shouldn’t tell anyone else until she talks to them about the situation. I remembered a couple of days later, I was walking up to my mom and her friends smoking next to a fire pit behind the motel and I overheard them talking about sex. I said confidently to them “I’ve had sex” and told them that woman’s name. The friends of my mom were mainly men, and they laughed and said stuff about how I am a man now and how lucky I was because of how attractive the woman was, and my mom said “told ya you shouldn’t have said anything” and I walked away crying. I had repressed this memory for a long time, never telling anyone else about it and for years, I had nightmares about the situation that kept me up at night. I remember years later, after my Nana passed away and we moved to the brink house and no longer had the motel in our name, I was still dealing with nightmares and would try to sleep in my mom’s bed to deal with them and one day, she told me I needed to grow up, that she couldn’t stand my restlessness in bed while sleeping, and I wasn’t allowed to sleep in her bed anymore. At that moment, I had suppressed the memory of this happening. As I grew up. I found that I got triggered easily by sexual advances from women and within the last year I remembered this situation as my first memory regarding sex and it was the beginning of my current healing journey.

Recently, in 2023, I was fired from a company I had worked for almost 10 years and I was in a dark moment of my life. I wasn’t really all there, taking my antidepressants while drinking and smoking weed and I was still on this disassociated mode. I also hadn’t remembered the situation above at all, and while some people who knew me at the time asked if something like this ever happened, I never admitted it because I had forgotten it. One night, I was out having some drinks with people I was associated with at the time, and there was a woman who was into me. She was dancing with me, flirting with me, letting me smack her ass while she twerked in the bar, and I was just going along with it. I am awkward in these situations but for some reason, she seemed to feel safe around me and wanted me to walk her home to her apartment. I was a smidge tipsy and high, but it wasn’t like I didn’t have my wits about me. We get to her apartment, and it was a chaotic mess. She was an artsy person, and since she living alone, she used the entire space to her advantage. There was this moment when she left to take some trash out and I had a panic attack. I felt tight around my waist, so my first instinct was to unbutton my pants and sit down. I was also nervous because, well, this person was attractive. A part of me believed that if I just sat there she would sit on my lap and it would begin. It wasn’t like I was a virgin, but my experience with sex is very limited and usually only happens from meeting people online. So, I kept my pants unbuttoned, covered it with my shirt and didn’t move from my spot very much, and when I did, I kept my hands in my pockets so my pants wouldn’t fall down (I could’ve just buttoned them back but I didn’t). Eventually, I tried an move pulling her towards me while examining a picture she drew and she leapt off the couch, and I got up to follow her, my pants dropped, she called me a creep and kicked me out. I didn’t have an explanation for anything that happened and when she approached a couple of days later and me asked me why I did that, I just told her I was drunk. She told me I definitely needed therapy and walked away. I found out recently that she had just started therapy right after that happened, and I didn’t go back to seek therapy again until about 7 months later.

This isn’t the only time I’ve harassed someone in this way. I am not proud of any of those moments, at all. But none of my therapist seem to make me feel shamed for doing them, since my intentions were never because I hated the other gender or because I liked doing it. I just was under the impression that men and women alike have the same inclinations and women could just as easily approach and initiate encounters as men can. And it wasn’t until this past year that I realized where that thought processed started. My current therapist (a women, for context) told me that primary, men are the initiators and women are the object of appeal and that is how we are biologically. I am still confused about dating dynamics, and feel really phony and fake any time I get the urge to approach and ask for a number or initiate a kiss. But any time I’ve ever had someone hit on me first, I immediately took it as a threat to my safety and rejected them.

I hope that whatever your issues are, whatever difficult situation you are facing or whatever trauma you are dealing with, that you get through it and find yourself on the other side a complete, secure human being. Thank you for reading.