When I was really young, like from ages 3-10, I was best friends with a girl my age—let’s call her K. We met at church and our families were close friends. She was a few months younger than me but a lot more confident than I was. Some people might describe her as bossy, but I was a passive kid and usually happy to be a follower so it didn’t really bother me.
idk. We did typical childhood girl best friend shit. Played dolls and tag and hide-and-seek, I shared my diary with her, we’d have sleepovers and whatever. We considered each other sisters.
My friend was raised in a very religious Christian family and I think this made her inclined to be a bit more rebellious and “edgy”. She would try doing “forbidden” things like stealing frogs or climbing fences, going into places she shouldn’t, or talk about “taboo” things like gore and death. When we were around 8 or 9 (I think???) she had a phase where she wanted to talk about sex. She would claim a classmate had told her a story about walking in on their parents having sex and she would “describe” it to me. She would pull up “sexy” videos on YouTube so we could watch them in secret in her bedroom. This always made me really uncomfortable and nervous because I was a pretty sheltered kid and didn’t like “breaking the rules”, but I never really protested or asked her to stop because that wasn’t something I did.
One night we had a sleepover. Since we were “both” girls and the same age, we slept in the same bed, in her bedroom, with the door closed. At some point, after everyone else has gone to sleep, my friend woke me up and said she wanted us to “act out” sex together. She told me I would play the “man” while she played the “woman”. She instructed me to take off all my clothes, even my underwear, and then she instructed me on how to position myself or touch her or whatever.
We never actually did anything “sexual”, I don’t think?? Because we were both prepubescent goddamn kids and she didn’t know what she was talking about even if she always pretended she did. She just vaguely told me to touch various private parts or whatever while presumably she did the same. The memory is fuzzy but I don’t think it could’ve lasted longer than five minutes total. I remember being uncomfortable the whole time and terrified her parents would discover us but I never really said no or tried to get her to stop.
Eventually she decided we were done and we put our clothes on and went back to sleep. She never mentioned that incident again and never asked me to do anything remotely like that again.
Around middle school I moved cities and stopped attending church regularly, so we fell out of touch. But our parents remained friendly and we would all have dinner together once every few years or so. I’m still on friendly terms with her even though we don’t talk anymore.
Sometime in 7th grade, I started having sexual intrusive thoughts. In 11th grade this escalated to full-blown OCD, which made my life complete hell from ages 16 to 18. Awful, nonstop, sickening intrusive thoughts about rape and pedophilia. At one point I was convinced that I must be a sexual predator and that I needed to kill myself to protect the people around me. I would self-harm to “punish” myself for the intrusive thoughts and because I thought it would keep me in “control” and prevent me from hurting other people.
It was horrible. But throughout the worst of my OCD, I never ever thought back to or ruminated even once about that one incident from my childhood. I don’t feel like I ever really Forgot about it—it just didn’t really come back into my brain, or occur to me as having Been Something That Happened, until years later, in my last year of university, long after I was diagnosed and medicated and in at least partial remission from OCD.
I’m doing better now, but ever since I first “re-remembered” that incident two years ago, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. During the worst of my OCD I would constantly question why this was happening to me, why I was having these horrible evil thoughts, why my brain had chosen these specific horrible images to focus on. I know OCD and other mental illnesses often are not caused by specific traumas. But now I’m starting to wonder more and more if somehow that Incident could have somehow impacted me more than I initially realized and somehow “triggered” the sexual OCD in me all those years later.
idk. It’s a stupid theory and I don’t think it holds much weight. It’s not like I have nightmares, intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, or other symptoms that centre around that specific incident. I did have an extended anxiety episode not long after I first remembered it, but nothing like that has happened since. So idk if I can say I was “traumatized” by that event, and blaming my OCD and all my other issues on that one single event seems like too much of a cop-out.
But I can’t stop thinking about it and I can’t wrap my head around it. It’s like I have this information in my head now and I’m not even necessarily distressed about it on a day to day basis, but there’s nothing I can feasibly Do with this information. I can’t call it rape because my friend was a child just like I was and she wasn’t being malicious, and she didn’t even know what she was doing. Neither of us knew jack shit about consent or sex because we were like nine-year-olds from Asian immigrant families raised in a Christian environment. I highly doubt my friend even remembers this incident. As far as I know, she’s off living a happy normal life and never did anything like that again. But I don’t know if I can ever look at her the same way after remembering this. And I can’t vent about this to my family or anything because 1) they likely wouldn’t understand or even believe me, and 2) it might cause tension with my friend’s parents or worse and I really don’t want that.
IDK man. It all fucking sucks. I’m angry sometimes that I have to live with this knowledge and for what purpose?? OCD ruined my life. OCD caused me to have so many complicated and painful hang-ups surrounding sex and sexual pleasure and it’s worse because I’m asexual and sex-repulsed and I just fucking wish I didn’t have to deal with libido or that bullshit at all.
Sometimes I wonder if I was assaulted as an extremely young child outside of That Incident and just don’t remember it. I’ve gone as far as to doing research re: the hospital where I was born to see if any cases were reported (and I realize how unhinged this sounds), though nothing ever came up. As much as it disgusts me to admit, I used to masturbate inappropriately in public as a child, well before That Incident ever happened, but I never knew that my actions were sexual/inappropriate until I realized it in hindsight in fucking high school. I’m not sure if anyone else even recognized that I was masturbating because I wasn’t unclothing myself or anything like that, but holy christ it makes me nauseous to think that so many other people, including classmates and teachers, have literally seen me masturbate because kid me didn’t realize that my actions were inappropriate and sexual in nature. And then I just wonder why the fuck did I do that and why didn’t anybody fucking tell me to stop or explain why it was wrong? Sometimes I wonder if early sex ed / age-appropriate education regarding these topics could’ve prevented That Incident from happening and also prevented me from doing inappropriate shit in public as a child. But that didn’t happen and now I live with this shame and guilt and confusion and disgust, and paranoia that I’m some sort of depraved pervert deep down, or that there could be some sort of sexual trauma in my past that I just don’t remember.
I don’t know, man. Fuck. I hate all of this so much.