This has kind of been weighing on me a bit lately, not sure why since this happened almost 10 years ago and I’ve had more recent trauma since then. I’ve never told this story in such detail before, hoping it’ll ease my mind a bit.

This bothered me for a long time but the circumstances made it pretty hard to get over... I was 13 and had just started dating my first like real boyfriend, he was 16. When we first started dating, he asked me a lot about sex and like all of the things I had done with a guy before but at this point I had only ever kissed someone before. After we were dating for about a week, he started to nonstop pressure me about having sex with him and I tried to hold my ground but eventually I agreed. When the day came for us to have sex, I got crazy anxious and decided I didn’t want to do it anymore. He seemed fine with my choice and we left his house to go for a hike instead; after hiking for like a mile, he took me to a “secret spot” that was like 20 minutes into the woods and away from the hiking trail. We made out for a bit but he got kind of aggressive and shoved me onto the ground. I hit my head on a rock and was unconscious for a bit; when I came to he was raping me. I tried to tell him to stop but he just laughed at me and held me down harder. When he finished, he told me he loved me and made me walk home.

I was afraid to break up with him and he was super abusive for the remaining weeks of our relationship. He had a very short temper and would hit me if I did even the smallest of things that could slightly inconvenience him. If I didn’t see him for a few days he would show up at my house and if I didn’t want to leave with him he’d hit me and make me go out anyway. I thought my mom would notice that I was being abused and help me to end things, but the situation escalated before she did anything.

I did not want to have sex with him again and kept saying I was too sore from the first time. He got tired of that excuse and sexually assaulted me in the backseat of my mom’s car. I’m sure she knew what was happening, she looked into the backseat multiple times because whenever he forced my legs apart I kicked the drivers seat and I couldn’t keep quiet since it hurt a lot.

The last night we were together, he had a complete meltdown while at his school’s Halloween party. He started the night by trying to convince me that he had gotten me pregnant and that I’d have to stay with him forever because of it, but partway through the night he snapped and started screaming at me and he grabbed my arm in front of one of his teachers. When he realized his teacher saw him touch me, he freaked out and started punching and kicking lockers. The people at his school wouldn’t allow me to get picked up by anyone other than who dropped me off, his parents, despite me trying to explain that my dad was at my grandmas house only 10 minutes from the school. I just wanted to go home so I agreed to get driven by his parents with him in the car with us. As I’m getting ready to go out to where his parents are, he storms past me and shoves me into a wall so hard that it breaks my rib, I didn’t notice that something might have been wrong until the adrenaline wore off though. He went to the end of the hall and punched through a glass window. The school made me wait for him to get first aid before I could go home and when I finally got home, he followed me out of the car to walk me to the door. I walked ahead of him and tried to ignore him, but as I opened my front door he grabbed my wrist. I knew his parents couldn’t see the porch from where their car was and I was so scared. Luckily, my dog came outside hackles up, teeth bared, and growling; he didn’t say a word and just hightailed it off my porch.

The next day, my dad made my mom call his mom to end the relationship and my dad called him to let him know he’d promptly end up in the hospital if he ever came anywhere near me. I tried to tell my mom that he raped me, but she just told me that regret wasn’t the same thing as rape and bought me a pregnancy test. I assumed I wasn’t actually raped, otherwise my mom would have been more concerned. The pregnancy test came up as negative, but it was a false result. I went to the ER a few weeks later for debilitating cramps and found out that I had gotten pregnant but had a miscarriage.

He stalked me for 3 years and even went as far to reach out to anyone I tried to date after him. He harassed me constantly and tried to convince me that he was the only person who could love me. He fucked with my head and made me think that he did what he did because he loved me. I believed that he was right for a while, but thought that because older guys(at this point I’m 14/15, so guys 17+) wanted to have sex with me I wasn’t unloveable anymore. I hooked up with a lot of guys, but I was still too young to really understand that I was being taken advantage of and I didn’t really think twice when I was made to do something I didn’t want to. It took me a while, but I sought help and now I’m in a much better place. It’s still hard and I find myself remembering assaults that I’ve spent so many years blocking out.

Typing this out was pretty therapeutic, not gonna lie.