Just needed to say/type it somewhere

Never been said to anyone, never been written down.

I don’t know if you would call you sexual assault/ harassment.

I don’t like big gatherings of people, Christmas or my birthday.

I come from a big family ( parents divorced and re married) constantly moving houses because they were too small, we finally moved to a house that fit us all. I was around 8-9 years old. After a while we started to become friends with the family next door, the mum was living with her parents and her kids after her divorce, her kids were around the same age as me and one of my other siblings. We went to school together just around the corner and we would walk home after school, every afternoon we would stay at the neighbors house tell Mum got back from picking up my other siblings. It was all fine and we all got really close to the family, they were almost like family.

As I got older the kids grandfather (who loved to bet on horse races) started to get blinder (I know that’s wrong) and couldn’t read the horses names in the paper so he started to ask my mum if I could go over and help him read them out to him I had no idea why he wanted me to do it he had two grandchildren that lived with him and I was a horrible reader. I went anyway, not that I had much of a choice, every weekend I went over and I was greeted with a hug and peck on the cheek ( nothing harmless). As soon as I started going through puberty the hugging and the ‘pecking’ started to linger, his hands stared to go lower down my back and he started ed commenting on the way my body looked. As my body started to become more ‘womanly’, as he put it, the longer he hugged the more he touched me the less I wanted to go over. I think he suspected that I was uncomfortable, he started buying me lollies ( what kid refuses lollies) and giving me ‘my share of the wins’. I never wanted to accept the money but he didn’t give me much of a choice, if I refused to take the money he would stick it in my pants or down my shirt, every time one of my younger siblings went with me he would try to stick the lollies down my pants and shirt as well.

I stopped going over as much and when I did I tried to make sure I was with someone or someone was there, his daughter and her kids moved out ( just up the rood) and his wife was put In a home. After that he would try to kiss me on my lips and would grab my ass when he wasn’t grabbing my ass he had his hands on my stomach just under my boobs or grazing my boobs. He stopped asking me to help him with his betting and instead got me doing things around the house, somethings I didn’t know how to do.

My mum finally stopped making me go. I had someone from my school comment on my body his exact words were ‘ nice tits wanna root?’ I started to struggled with depressed after that message it all came back and it made me feel horrible and started harming myself, after awhile i started feeling better and it wasn’t a constant thing I would think about but it was always in the back of my head.

Christmas is coming up and I should be excited, it’s one my nieces first Christmas and my other nieces and nephews are finally old enough to get excited over it. I want to be excited if not for my self then for them but I can’t not even a little bit. He is going to be there. And no matter how hard I try I can’t get over that.

I am 18 years old I have only had one boyfriend in my life that only lasted a couple months because of something he said that made everything came back worse then before my depression was really bad, I hardly spoke to anyone, I wasn’t eating properly and I was hurting myself a lot worse then I could have ever imagined and I just couldn’t deal with him touching me any more.

My siblings are constantly say that they think I’m gay ( I’m not and I’m not saying being gay is wrong or anything) because Iv never really had a boyfriend, even if I wanted to I could never tell them that someone they think of as family and call grandad is the reason I don’t enjoy Christmas or my birthday, the reason I don’t like to be around a lot of people but at the same time don’t like to be around just one person because maybe they might figure it out, the reason I spent so many nights crying myself to sleep willing myself to forget how discussing I felt when he would touch me, when he put money down my bra or my pants like he was trying to buy me. Every Christmas, every big gathering we have, every birthday, Im just I’m scared, scared of everyone finding out who or what he is, I’m scared of ruining a family and I’m scared that I’m going to go down that rabbit hole again and I’m not going to come back out of it.