Having Anxiety/Guilt/Panic about my Childhood. Please help.

Wow, im finally actually talking to someone in the world. im 21, Ive kept this a secret my whole life and have never told anyone. This is something that i think about everyday of my life but recently for some reason has been just eating away at me so much that i cant think about anything else. I dont know if my feelings are right about what i did.
When i was probably 9 or 10, my cousin (same age) and i would be alone often and we both liked to talk about naked girls and stuff. (we are both males). We had both been exposed to porn but he also had sexual experiences of sorts, I had not. I dont remember how it happened but I think he ended up suggesting that we touch each other, have oral sex, etc. And thats what we did. I definitely wasnt the one to come up with the idea, but i cant remember really resisting it either. Anyways, we did that several times and I remember feeling weird about it a few times and saying stuff like "I dont know if we should do this, it might make us gay," and he was kind of like "awh so what, it doesnt matter" and then it continued.
I wish the story stopped there, but it doesnt. Fast forward about a year and i was probably 11 years old, i asked a neighbor over to play video games (he was a year or 2 younger than me) and he came over. I dont know what came over me but i wanted to do more sexual stuff like my cousin had showed me so i asked if he had ever had a blowjob before, (I had heard from another young kid that he had). I cant remmber what he said but i think that he said that he just wanted to play video games. I told him that he should lay down and he did and i took his pants down and for about 1 second (literally) i performed oral on him. I realized instantly that it was wrong because he really didnt seem to be interested in it/ know what was going on so i stopped and his parents came to the door right at about the same time. That was the most extreme thing that ever happened between me and him, but i think in that same year i randomly would try to expose myself to him but nothing else ever actually happened. His parents ended up telling my brother something vague like "stop teaching him bad stuff". I felt super embaressed and never did anythign again.
I am nervous right now just typing this message to you all, as I just feel an incredible amount of shame and guilt and panic just reliving this. The reason why i decided to try to get him to do sexual things with me is because I had heard that he had done sexual stuff with his brother so i thought he would be into experimenting with me. Now the image that replays everyday in my head is me trying to get another kid to do something that I dont think he wanted to do.
What do i do? My guilt has gotten so bad, it has made me so nervous to go in public for fear of seeing him or his family. Shortly after the incident happned he told me that he couldnt hang out anymore cause his parents said so but basically told me it was ok. A few years down the road we were around each other a few times and it didnt seem too weird. From the ages of 13-16 i didnt really think much about it but these last few years and especially last few days have been absolute hell. I really just hope i didn't hurt him, hope his family didnt tell everyone in the world, and i hope that im just overreacting. But no matter what i do, my mind goes to the worst thing like "oh my god i molested someone, that is so ###$ up beyond belief" i just cant do it anymore. (by the way, everything is totally good now that im an adult, im not an offender or anything).
I feel like the person i am today is not the same person i was when i was 11. But its just,...i dont know. im rambling. please help. I just want to die thinking about what i did.

I relate to your feeling of constant guilt / panic / shame and the feeling of being monstrous, while simultaneously feeling distanced from your younger self... the fact is that the human brain develops into one's mid-20s; so at least on one level, you literally are a different person from who you were when you were 11. Also, you were a very young child when you did the above... that doesn't mean that what happened wasn't child-on-child abuse, but I do think you deserve far more slack that if you had been an adult (or even a teenager) doing the same thing. I also feel like you should be allowed to move on, especially as you are so aware of what you did and clearly lack any desire to do anything like it again. I imagine that if you have sex in the future (or have had sex since then) that you have always been / will always be conscientious and careful that your partner is happy and comfortable and into what was / is happening. To be honest, it sounds like you were exploited a little by your cousin and, in turn, you exploited your friend... it's a sad state of affairs, but it doesn't mark you out as evil or twisted in any way. I think it was mostly foolish experimentation by a young child - not even yet a teenager. Please keep going forward.

It might help cheer you up to look at most of the comments on this article about a young man who committed a sexual offence at a similar age. People can be surprisingly forgiving when it comes to children committing crimes and I think the vast majority of people would recognise that you have changed / progressed massively from the young child you once were.

http://www.texasobserver.org/life-on-the-list/

Thanks for your comment. It's nice to bounce this off someone else. Yes i have had sex since then , with my girlfriend. I am very respectful of boundaries as an adult. I consider myself just like any other person my age, I would never ask anyone to do something they didnt want to do. (i would never do anything with anyone of the same sex now either).

Do you think that it is possible that it didn't affect the kid that much? Im really really really hoping that it didn't. Im hoping that he just viewed it as me trying to experiment and being a little bit too brazen about it.

The very weird thing about this to me, is that, through the rest of my childhood i continued to hang around the kid and things didnt seem too awful. I even hung out with his dad and him one time when i was 16 with other people also, and he was pretty nice to me. I seem to have not thought about it a whole lot back during the ages of 12-15 but from 16-20 i thought about it randomly and it bothered me , but...now that im 21, it has become just agonizing for me. Is it possible that im obsessing about it more than anyone else is? Some days i want to kill myself, which is really weird because im such a cheery person otherwise.

I'm trying to decide if i need to just forget that any of this happened, apologize to the kid, seek therapy, etc. I seem to feel differently on different days. Its starting to take over my life though, im losing sleep over it, i think about it when i wake up, I keep checking this post obsessively like every 2 hours to see if anyone else has commented. I feel insane right now, and I dont know if i can handle these feelings much longer.

I think he may have experienced it as experimentation and not abuse. You were pretty close in age, remember. It was unfortunate... but I don't think it was monstrous whatsoever, y'know. There is also a reason why young kids who commit crimes (if you stretch and consider this a crime) have their slates wiped clean when they reach 18 / 21 / some point in adulthood.

It sounds like you've grown up to be a very cautious and compassionate and respectful person, very careful about sexual boundaries - much better than many men, I'm sure. What happened might be regrettable, but I also think it has helped form you into the really decent adult you are today. You certainly don't deserve to die and I reckon you have a lot to offer the world!

As said, I very much relate to your feelings of panic and the desire to kill yourself (I have posted about it elsewhere and this is your thread so I will not detail here, but I committed statutory rape against a 16-year-old when I was 21) but I think you deserve to cut yourself some major slack. As mentioned, if you look at the article I posted (and that kid arguably committed a worse sexual offence, since it was incestuous) the vast, vast majority of posters believed that the guy should be allowed to move on and have a happy live, on account of his being very young at the time of the incident and his reflection, guilt and strong character years down the line. Please keep your chin up if you can. I think therapy might help.