Am I a bad person? Help please.

A couple of years ago I had a huge falling out with my closest friend of 10 years. A felt so awful I couldn't sleep most nights. After several months, when our relationship began to repair again. I still felt awful, all day every day. I hated myself more than ever before.

One day I felt suddenly intensely sick with worry over a past """love interest""" (online). This was when I was 20. I hadn't spoken to this person for two years. They were two years younger than me. I felt so intensely disgusted with myself. For being an 18 year old interested in a 16 year old. I felt like a pedophile. I was terrified of the police banging down the door. I felt like suicide was my only option, but I wasn't brave enough to follow through with it.

I bottled that up from early December to some point in the summer. Every day I felt sick to my stomach and I had to force food down. Eventually I caved and confided in my mum, which also meant coming out as gay. She looked at me like I was crazy for worrying so much. I felt a bit better. But the worry didn't shift. I still felt awful. Like, just disgusted with myself.

A few weeks passed and a memory I had no recollection of at all suddenly came back to me. And it's still so hazy that I can't tell what parts are real. Basically, I remembered a night when I was 11 or 12 years old with a friend of the same age. She was staying over. Which she always did, this was the first and only time there was a flirty/sexual energy between us. I vaguely remember us massaging each other and eventually at bed time sharing my bed and cuddling very tight and lots of grinding. I remember her asking me if I had ever cuddled with anyone like that before, and I answered no. Then, and this is the horrible part. I think I placed her hand around my penis. I have no idea why. I thought I had masturbated and ejaculated. BUT now I remember it as actually wetting myself? With nerves. And rushing off to the toilet to the toilet to clean up, and then returning to bed. Maybe both are true. This is humiliating to confess.

And it left me convinced that I was a rapist/pedophile/sex offender/awful person. With anti depressants I've managed to function. But this drove me to such intense anxiety I was shaking all the time and I couldn't leave the house, at all.

Sometimes I still get waves of anxiety and I really don't know how to feel. Mostly I feel sick and like I'll never feel normal again. And I wonder if I deserve to.

With sex-related stuff. To be the perpetrator, is to be irredeemably evil. It throws my whole identity into question. My views are feminist, I hate when rape is enabled/downplayed. I just don't know how to feel.

Am I a rapist? Am I a bad person? I've calmed down a lot. But at my worst I was compari myself to every sex offender that appeared on to or online.

First of all, *I absolutely reject* the idea that you fancying a 16-year-old when you were 18 makes you a paedophile, especially as you didn't act on this feeling!

Not only is the 16-18 age gap incredibly common (my parents, for instance, met when my dad was 18 and my mum 16) I don't think it even necessitates a power imbalance. Any sensible state either has a close-in-age exemption of 3 or 5 years (or, like, 10 in Florida!!)when it comes to the age of consent and, of course, two thirds of the states put the AoC at 16.

But even this is all hypothetical! Because it was just a felling you had in your mind / heart. And what counts is actions, not thoughts. You are allowed to think or feel any possible thing you want within your own mind. There are no laws against thoughts and they do not fundamentally exist outside of your skull in society. So, you don't owe society anything regarding that. It was perfectly normal and you recognised that online you have to be very careful when it comes to those under 18 and you respected that. You did nothing wrong.

Regarding what you did as a kid, it very much sounds like mutual experimentation. Moving your friend's hand (if you ever did that) was the rash behaviour of a child and, obviously, as an adult you would now always know before doing something like that.

But you were a young child. It would be absurd to say that an adult man should have to be shackled to their behaviour as a young child when their brain was still in its early stages of development! You are very literally - on an objective, scientific level - a different human being to who you were when you were 11 or 12. I also suspect that even if you knew that some other 11-year-old child had done what you think you did, you wouldn't judge them anywhere near as harshly as you are currently judging yourself. You certainly wouldn't say that 11-year-old was the same as Bill Cosby or Jeffrey Dahmer or anything like that.

Really I think this is something that you should discuss with a therapist. Personally, I think the chances of your being reported are incredibly slim (as in, near to 0.01 %) and I think it could prove very helpful for you if you have not being doing so already.

You're fine. I promise.

P.S. I also know that *a lot* of people here in Remorse (including myself) will relate to your post very strongly. There's definitely varying levels of seriousness in terms of past behaviour admitted to on this board (though I'm sure each poster tends to consider themselves the absolute worst offender and far worse than any other poster!!) but I reckon that if you spend some time reading their stories you feel often feel some level of compassion... I suspect that, at the very least, you won't immediately think "I want to see this person hung, drawn and quartered" or "tortured to death"... so if you can extend that compassion to other people here, please try to extend that same compassion to yourself.

Thank you so much for your response. It helps a lot.

I live in England. AOC is 16. We did flirt, and he was always wanting to push further. Eventually I stopped talking to him completely. Because it felt innapropriate to me. I contacted them again last year, and we had exactly two days of lovey dovey messages, confessions of love, playlists made, and then they suddenly completely ignored me and appeared to be involved with someone else.

It kind of helped me realise just how manipulative they were. That's another story. But basically, I felt a real affinity for this person. They were pretty coercive/selfish.

As for what happened when I was 11. I do ultimately know, it's near nothing in the grand scheme of things. I do believe that childhood experimentation is exactly that, experimentation. It's entirely confusing, and honestly for both instigator and acted upon, (or reciprocatvly instigated). It's potentially a traumatising memory for both parties. More often, it's barely remembered if at all.

I still worry that what happened was rape. Which terrifies me to my core.

I do honestly hope that one day, more empathic and frank discussions such as the ones on these boards can be had on a larger scale.

We're all constantly learning in life. I do know it's messed up how intensely critical I am of myself. Considering just last night someone wouldn't accept me saying no and me being barely awake. I've been coerced/"shhhhhh'd" into intimacy on several occasions. ... But it's not something I dwell on.

I think, sex education is so majorly disjointed and heavily focuses on STDs and pregnancy. So, I feel that's a major part of people having such vastly differing ideas of boundaries.

I'm rambling now. I feel a lot better than yesterday. But I still do worry about whether or not I am an 'offender' a 'bad person' an 'attacker' a 'rapist', evil.

-- Sun Nov 08, 2015 8:04 pm --

I failed to clarify exactly why I feel so bad about this childhood (age 11/12) memory. Again, it's very very hazy. But I think the hand incident occurred while my friend was asleep. That's what makes me feel so disgusted and terrified and confused. I'm both baffled and haunted by this. I just have no idea why it happened, what exactly happened or what any of it means exactly, and how I should feel. How I'm allowed to feel.

I feel a lot more sane and self forgiving these days. (With occasional bad days) But there is still a nagging doubt that I'm disgusting, a predator. (A rapist?)

Well, you're definitely not a rapist. You wouldn't meet the criteria for British law and even in countries with a less restrictive definition of rape than here in Britain, penetration is still required.

That doesn't mean what you did was right, of course. **But** 1.) You were a young child. THIS IS IMPORTANT! As said, you wouldn't hold anyone else for behaviour they committed when they were 11 and their brain and moral code was far from developed... indeed, while you might 'tell off' an 11-year-old who did this, or even get them into therapy, it is ludicrous to criminalise them. Most civilised nations realise this and - to speak honestly - here in Britain we only jail children of the 10/11 age when they do something absolute heinous, such as with the murder of Jamie Bulger (though I still strongly feel that even with that horrible case, imprisonment ultimately did more harm that good). And what you did was **leagues** away from that. Not even comparable. 2.) Obviously someone who is asleep can't consent, but I also suspect you might be worsening the memory to punish yourself. Ultimately, I do think this was a case of experimentation, rather than abuse --and even if one were to decide to label it abuse-- it still wouldn't make you a paedophile, rapist or predator. Medical / child development journals and psychiatry tend to distinguish between potentially sexually abusive behaviour between children within 5 years of each other and cases where the gap is larger than this. This is partly why the Josh Duggar / Lena Dunham cases have been taken more seriously (apart from their fame and other reasons). Anything that is considered abusive within 5 years is deemed 'peer abuse'.

So, we have a case in which an 11-year-old child committed a non-penetrative act upon a child their own age who may or may not have been sleeping in the spirit of experimentation. At the time, worry of some concern - sure. But not something monstrous and definitely not something you should (or would!) ever be defined by.

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As for the 16-year-old lad. I respect you for backing away as you felt uncomfortable about the situation. In a similar situation when I was a few years older I didn't back away from a relationship with someone of that age (also being British, having grown up with 16 as the AoC) and I regret it bitterly and daily. So, good for you! Teenagers can be jerks though (I was pretty pressured into the relationship too, though that's no excuse - the girl in question was already in a "relationship" with an older married woman and I think it had caused her a lot of problems and she was understandably keen to find love and affection from another source and we'd been online penfriends for 5 years or so. Basically, what she needed was support and better parents - not romance or sex) and while I would always be hesitant to come down harshly on a kid, maybe they wouldn't have been right for you in the long run anyway!