never feeling like i belong because of sexual experiences

[banja]

This is going to be a very long rant i think. Uhm most of these things i've never told anyone but i just need to get them of my chest, and yeah i don't know i hope basically just ranting isn't against the rules. I am in therapy and talk to my therapist, who is great btw, about a lot of things but i just physically can't go into detail about these things. Also sorry if my English isn't great.

I don't even know where or how to start, i think in general i'm just kind of messed up, my parents hit me as a child which i only recently, now as a young adult, realised is well quite problematic. We also moved often, my first friends were basically more like bullies i really liked for some reason. And then for years when i was like 10 i just had no friends. I was in my room the whole time because i had no hobbies or anything either and just spent time on my phone. That is the reason for me getting into fandom basically. And while fandom has given me a lot it also made stuff weird often.

When i was 12 i met this woman online who seemed very nice and we like did some fandom text roleplay but then she wanted to do sexual roleplays and instead of saying something about me being 12 i wanted to seem cool to her so i tried my best to be good at it even though i had no idea what was going on. We also exchanged letters which means she knew my address so it took me a while to block her, even though then i didn't really see it as a problem.

So when i was 14 i started doing text roleplays on other websites, i would pretend to be an adult and did sexual roleplays. Through other people i got confronted with really hard kinks, i started to seek out more about those and while i (thank god) never got into porn i watched some hentai and especially read fanfic and ultimately started masturbating to kinks like bestiality, age play and diapers. I don't like these things, having read them makes my skin crawl and makes me feel like i'm disgusting, but the scariest thing seems that i fear that if i read them now i could still get off to them. For months i've limited my masturbation now and only read vanilla stuff, but for probably the four years before that i would masturbate multiple times a week and feel guilty and disgusting about it. In general all these things make me feel dirty and like a very bad person.

I do have OCD, my therapist diagnosed me with it, and a big part of it is me being really scared about possibly becoming an abuser, especially towards children. I've always been normal and good with kids and never hurt anyone in my life so it seems unrealistic but in a way it's just one of my scariest fears i think. Also just being kinky seems scary to me, all my life i've just wanted to be normal and fit in.

There's a few other factors like me not being sure about my Gender for also a good five years now, which i struggled with for a while. Me being queer in general, probably aro? which is scary as well because i'm really really scared of being alone. I struggled all through school, with grades and finding friends, then finally graduated last year and i've been struggling with finding my path ever since which has been pretty tough on me. My therapist also diagnosed me with Adhd which makes a lot of sense and at least explains some of my hardships.

People frequently describe me as a good person but i just feel like no one really knows me because they don't know what i've done in regards to masturbation. I have friends now, really great friends who i can talk to about almost anything but i can't even tell these things to my therapist. And really i'm just scared that i don't deserve love now and kind off fucked up my own life because of this. So yeah sorry for this verylong rant, i don't even know what i want from this but just getting this off my chest and being heard by someone would be great.

[Heather]

Hi there, banja, and welcome to the boards. <3 I'm so sorry that you grew up with physical abuse, bullying and so much isolation. I very much hope that you're safer now, and I can see how being so isolated put you in the positon of having to navigate some things on your own that, ideally, you'd have had supportive guidance with.

There's a lot to address here, so I'm going to just start with a couple of things, and a few questions, and then we can take it from there and see where our conversation leads us, okay?

One of the first things I want to share with you is that the idea that there is sex that is vanilla and sex that is kinky is ultimately totally arbitrary. There is no "normal" sex and "abnormal" sex, because the diversity of human sexuality is as vast as the diversity of human beings. Whatever ideas we have about what we think is normal and abnormal largely come from things like cultural biases and norms (like those that stem from making only the kind of sex that makes babies the default kind of sex), media (which mostly holds up those same biases and norms), gender binaries, and what kinds of sex people talk about most versus the kind people tend to hide or keep secret. And what you are talking about here is primarily fantasy, and that -- sexual fantasy -- is even MORE diverse than sexual behavior, because fantasy doesn't have to have the same kinds of boundaries IRL behavior does, since what we think about in our heads can't hurt anyone, isn't something we need anyone's consent for, and also isn't limited by things we're limited by in reality, like gravity, language barriers, or what we'd actually be comfortable doing in real life. So, truly, there is no "normal" when it comes to human sexuality. There is just a giant range of very diverse ideas, feelings and behaviors.

You masturbating a few times a week and fantasizing or role-playing the things you have doesn't make you a bad person or dirty. It just makes you human.

While ideally, no one is engaging in online role play without honesty about things that would matter to someone -- like how it very much matters to most adults doing that that they are doing it with other adults -- I think it's a lot to expect that someone who isn't even in or is barely in their teens will necessarily have those kinds of ethics, especially if a parent or other adult hasn't taught them about that pretty expressly. And of course, the safety of someone as a young person also really matters here, too. But these things are in your past: what you can do about them now is just make different choices. Feeling shame about them won't do anything beneficial for you, that'll just make you feel bad.

You say you worry you have f*cked up your life with your sexual behavior: can you say more to me about what you think you have messed up? Can you also talk about why you think you don't deserve love?

Too, has your therapist talked to you about how intrusive thoughts -- like worrying you will hurt children, for example -- are often a part of having OCD?