I still remember the night I was at my friend's house, letting him pound into me. Stomach against the bed. All I
could think was, "I hope he cums soon so I can get this over with". It wasn't the first time I had thought this
during sex. This was usually what I thought, actually. But what was different this time, was that I actually
spoke up and asked to stop. I didn't usually do that. Usually I would just try and shut off my brain until it
was over. I remembered going to the bathroom and crying. Texting my boyfriend and telling him about all the shit
I was feeling. "I feel like I'm raping myself," I said, knowing he was probably asleep. I just had to get this
off my chest to someone. I didn't know how else to describe it. I was the person who initiated the sex.
I
have just turned 19 and my total body count is probably a larger number. I wouldn't know because I've pretty
much stopped keeping count. For some reason, throughout my teenage years, I felt like it was my responsibility
to give people sex. Even when I didn't really want it, even when I wasn't even attracted to the person in
question, I would still end up in bed with them. It felt like some otherworldly force was overtaking my body and
propositioning them instead of me. I'm still mystified as to why I wanted to do this. I know logically why,
because I felt like I owed people sex as a gift, and I craved attention so desperately that I would destroy
myself in the process. Or that I was so afraid that if I didn't give up my body to them, they would stop
thinking I was a person worth being around. But it just doesn't compute when I look back at 16 year old me.
When we talk about self-harm, we tend to only focus on cutting. This narrow representation means that people
who participate in other forms of self-harm, such as biting, scratching, burning, and more psychological are
left feeling with not much to relate to. I've never related to the depictions we see in dramatized accounts of
mental illness, a crying girl reaching for a knife, slowly and methodically carving into her wrist or thighs. My
self harm came as impulse. Physically, during meltdowns, I couldn't stop myself from biting my arm or beating my
leg. It was the only way I could sensorily calm myself. I refused to admit this as self-harm until I stopped
having intense meltdowns regularly. You don't see these representations of self-harm in media and have it
acknowledged as such nearly ever, so it makes calling it that feel appropriative. The same comes with
psychological self-harm. Many people online participate in this unknowingly. Purposefully seeking out content
that makes them irrationally upset or triggers trauma is self-harm. "Ragebaiting" online to intentionally
receive loads of negative responses is a form of self-harm. Offline, pushing away friends and family,
consistently shit-talking yourself, starting drama all the time... Anything where you're putting yourself in a
socially precarious position could count. And seeking out sex when you don't really want it definitely counts as
well.
This feeling that you owe another person your body is a road that leads right off a cliff. Once someone
gets used to the constant access, attempts to take it away are met with backlash. I was first raped by my
ex-girlfriend. She was at my house and we were both sitting on the bed. She asked to have sex. In a rare
instance of boundary setting, I said no. She pushed. She kept pushing. She used her unstable homelife, saying
things like "What if this is the last time I'll be able to come over because of my step-dad? I just want sex
this once". And after enough pushing, I broke. I remember after she had cum laying alone, naked, sprawled on the
bed and thinking to myself, "I know this is rape, but I don't want to admit it because I like her". After this
happened, I had forgot about it until I broke down crying talking to one of my friends about her after our
relationship ended. I learned to stop trying to say no. Sex turned into an endurance test rather than something
enjoyable. In my relationship with her, I had already made the concession that I would let her use my vagina
(something I was otherwise a hard no on) because she didn't want to do anything other than PIV (she was a trans
woman), and I just wanted to make her happy.
It was after that night at my friend's house, breaking down in
the bathroom, that I realized I had forsaken myself. Instead of owning my body myself I had fallen into the same
traps of "self-sacrifice" that lead to me being groomed online when I was younger. But this time, there were no
older men. In fact, in most of these relationships, I was the older one. I should have known better than to give
myself up the way that I did. I came to the resolution that I had to stand up for myself, otherwise I would die.
I had to learn to set boundaries instead of sitting quietly and letting sex happen, or giving myself up entirely
once a weak signal of attraction was received.
After this event, my senior year began. I was visiting
someone else who I had dated. It was the first time we had seen each other since summer ended, because her mom
put strict restrictions on her. She would message me unprompted sexual texts constantly, most of which I
wouldn't respond to, leading up to this day. Her mom let me go to her house again, finally. I didn't want to
have sex. For one thing, I didn't want to get banned from her house again after I had just been allowed back in,
for another I was also there with a friend, and finally, I just didn't want to. I wanted to show her YouTube
videos. She didn't care. She started humping my leg, writing on her phone and showing it to me saying "I'm so
horny", done this way to not disturb the other person in the room. I kept whispering back for her to stop. For
her to pay attention to the screen. She didn't listen. But I didn't give in.
Instead of ignoring that, I
broke things off with her. I chewed her out in a group chat hosted on a Google Doc, as school restrictions would
require, censoring the worst of it to not automatically flag the system. I've made a lot of steps now to be able
to say no. Every time that I do I feel proud of myself. I've been able to actually enjoy sex again, now that it
feels less like a punishment or a donation. Embracing my kinks helped a lot too, because vanilla sex has never
been anything particularly enjoyable to me in the first place. The reason why I'm writing this is because a guy
I was seeing asked me to come over and hook up with him. Instead of saying yes and having to mentally prepare
myself for something I didn't want to do, I said I wasn't really feeling it. And he respected that. To anyone
who has had sexually healthy relationships, this shouldn't be as big of a deal to them as it was to me. But for
me, I was so proud of myself for saying no. So I wanted to write a reflection on this, and everything that I had
gone through to point out why that was a testament to my healing. I've finally come to a point where I can take
ownership over my sexuality, so that I can do sex in a way that feels good now. Now I don't feel like I have to
turn my brain off when I have sex to avoid that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Now I can enjoy it.