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toujours_nigel So I just watched this vid-series about a girl who got sucked into an abusive relationship at 13! with a dude she met online. (link goes to the first vid)
And. I was online at 13, and my parents didn't know how the internet worked, and I was definitely not supervised at ALL. I wanna say I was canny and smart but I mean. I was smol and I always freeze around sexual assault, so. One of the things I am very grateful to one of my older friends is that though he had a crush on me when I was 17, 18, he never said anything about it till I was 24-25, because at 17 I was still very vulnerable and--while not confused about my sexuality--desperate to be liked.
And that was at 17, when I'd dated a girl for a couple years and was finally making friends with more than one person at a time. (College was good to me.) At 13 I had 0 friends irl. At 13 this girl I thought was a friend had stopped talking to me and turned everyone against me for over a year, because I told her I liked her more than my other "friends", so, uh, yeah (eighth grade was interesting).
At 13, I would absolutely have fallen into the grooming trap, I'd have been so fucking grateful someone was paying attention to me, and well at 13 I was still making the transition from "I like kissing girls!" to "I'm a lesbian!"; I mean, it was 2003 in India. I didn't know the word lesbian as anything more than a bit sensationalisation, and would have been extremely relieved to have liked kissing a dude. I was also dark and fat and awkward. (I still am all those things, and I mean I'm darker and way fatter, but anyway.) So, yeah. Fuck the people telling this kid she was stupid. She was a baby.
But I was lucky. I didn't run into creeps. Instead I lurked around LJ and fictionalley and some forums like angelfire and just... gorged on fic and wistfully observed Cool People Being Creative. By 15-16 I was writing myself--my only published stories are from those two years--but I still didn't have the courage to approach these Cool People online, or to publish my fanfic, iirc. Maybe it was the lurking that kept me safe for those 3 years or so; I'm not gonna pretend fandom didn't or doesn't have predators. But I think it's also that the people whose journals and stories I was reading offered such good, strong, role-models of being Creative Types and also of Female Friendships that I sort of settled into wanting that as #lifegoals. Either way I'm grateful and thankful.
And. I was online at 13, and my parents didn't know how the internet worked, and I was definitely not supervised at ALL. I wanna say I was canny and smart but I mean. I was smol and I always freeze around sexual assault, so. One of the things I am very grateful to one of my older friends is that though he had a crush on me when I was 17, 18, he never said anything about it till I was 24-25, because at 17 I was still very vulnerable and--while not confused about my sexuality--desperate to be liked.
And that was at 17, when I'd dated a girl for a couple years and was finally making friends with more than one person at a time. (College was good to me.) At 13 I had 0 friends irl. At 13 this girl I thought was a friend had stopped talking to me and turned everyone against me for over a year, because I told her I liked her more than my other "friends", so, uh, yeah (eighth grade was interesting).
At 13, I would absolutely have fallen into the grooming trap, I'd have been so fucking grateful someone was paying attention to me, and well at 13 I was still making the transition from "I like kissing girls!" to "I'm a lesbian!"; I mean, it was 2003 in India. I didn't know the word lesbian as anything more than a bit sensationalisation, and would have been extremely relieved to have liked kissing a dude. I was also dark and fat and awkward. (I still am all those things, and I mean I'm darker and way fatter, but anyway.) So, yeah. Fuck the people telling this kid she was stupid. She was a baby.
But I was lucky. I didn't run into creeps. Instead I lurked around LJ and fictionalley and some forums like angelfire and just... gorged on fic and wistfully observed Cool People Being Creative. By 15-16 I was writing myself--my only published stories are from those two years--but I still didn't have the courage to approach these Cool People online, or to publish my fanfic, iirc. Maybe it was the lurking that kept me safe for those 3 years or so; I'm not gonna pretend fandom didn't or doesn't have predators. But I think it's also that the people whose journals and stories I was reading offered such good, strong, role-models of being Creative Types and also of Female Friendships that I sort of settled into wanting that as #lifegoals. Either way I'm grateful and thankful.
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Date: 2018-12-27 03:57 am (UTC):(((