For the past year I’ve been obsessing over if I have accidentally acted sexually abusive or at the least inappropriate with an old friend. I’m here to ask for reassurance on this, as well as what I should do to handle this situation, both if I was harmful and if I wasn’t. This has been on my mind almost 24/7 and is getting in the way of my life completely. This is something I’ve talked to others about, though with less detail and I’ve been told everythings ok. Though I have a hard time believing that and understanding how that’s the case.
When I was 13 I ended up befriending someone online who said they were also 13. However around a year into the friendship they confessed they lied about their age and were a little under four years younger than myself. I felt uncomfortable when I found out, both due to the age difference and that my friend had lied to me, but I decided to stay their friend. This was since we got along well, and when I was 11 most of my friends were 15-17 due to no one closer to my age living near me. This friendship continued on till I had just turned 17 and they were 13. I am 18 now, this has been on my mind on and off since I had ended the friendship because I was beginning to feel uncomfortable with the gap. I want to say before I go more into detail on this friendship that their family was aware we were friends and I had spoken to them on the phone before, while I don’t know if they knew my age as far as I know they had no issues with us being friends and I know that they would tell them about our friendship. Of course this was nothing that I had issues with, in fact I was rather happy to speak with them over the phone.
Sometimes they’d bring up sexual topics. I would either tell them to stop, ignore them, or change the subject. For example, one time they brought up DDLG, told me it was something that they liked and asked me what I thought of it. I asked what that was as I had never heard of it before, after they explained it to me I told them I thought that it was gross and they shouldn’t be looking at that stuff. Or they’d sometimes send me drawn explicit images as a joke, and I’d tell them to stop, though keeping the same tone.
I feel like though there’s some stuff that I could’ve done better, though I’ve been told that none of this is bad I can’t shake the feeling it is:
When I was 13 they asked if I wanted to see their nudes. I said sure, mostly because due to my age I had no idea what nudes were. I remember looking at their message for a while trying to figure out what they meant, and thinking they meant the candy brand Nerds. Luckily no photos were sent, they showed me a makeup brand called nude and asked about my response. I said I thought it was gonna be some sort of joke. I should’ve but I didn’t want to admit I didn’t understand what was going on
I was telling them about a stupid script my group and I wrote and were going to preform for my drama class. I sent it to them, it had what was essentially “doin’ your mom” jokes in it
I was telling them about an online friend I had at the time, and how he really liked Lisa from the video game Genshin Impact, though since it was a mobile game I assumed it had to do more with the characters appearance
They had asked me what some sexual term meant, I said I didn’t know either because I genuinely didn’t. They told me that if I didn’t say they would just look it up themselves, so I copied and pasted the first definition I found on google
We were both fans of the visual novel series Danganronpa. I introduced them to it as it was something I was super into at the time and wanted to be able to chat with them about it. They brought up the character Miu Iruma from the games and her hypersexuality. I said that she was one of the few characters I disliked from the series due to that, and brought up a specific scene from the games where I felt it went a little overboard
I sent them Valentine’s Day cards I found themed around a band we were both interested in. These were not directed at them, I sent them because I thought they were funny and told them this. They also thought they were funny, but didn’t understand one of them. I gave context the context that it was a refference to one of their song lyrics, while the song itself is nonsexual that one line does contain sexual content. After I explained that they found it funny
An album I was looking forward to just came out, I was very happy about this as I was looking forward to it since it was announced. I sent them it and told them about how it was just released as we both liked the genre. They pointed out a small drawn penis on the cover that I didn’t notice. I apologised and explained that
We would send each other snip bits of music sometimes. They send me this very sexually explicit song and I said that I don’t really listen to that type of music. I sent them a snip bit of a different song that had minor sexual references and that that was about all I listened too
They sent me something akin to the rice purity score test. Most of the questions on it were things like “have you ever drank?” or “have you ever skipped class?”. One of these questions was “Have you ever had sex?”. We both sent our answers and joked about how they had more yeses than I did
The song WAP (wet ass pussy) by Cardi B was very popular at the time, It’s been awhile so I can’t remember any context except that we were joking around and I believe they brought up the song. I sent a voice recording of myself laughing and saying the line “Macaroni in a pot, that’s a WAP” (I believe the actual lyric does say the whole thing and not the abbreviation, but I remember that that’s what I said.
As I said near the beginning I’ve talked to plenty of people, all of which have told me that none of this counts as predatory but I can’t shake this worry that I’ve done something very wrong here. I find myself thinking and worrying about this constantly, either looking for reassurance, reading stories of online CSA to make sure that I didn’t do any of the behaviours that others have gone through, I’ve also written down in a journal every interaction I can remember to make sure. It’s my own fault but this has been making me very suicidal. I want to be wrong. I really hope I didn’t do anything bad.
