I recently started seeing a therapist to help with my depression and by talking to her, I started remembering things from my childhood that I had maybe tried to forget about or blocked from my mind. The thing that’s been bothering me the most is how I lost my virginity. When I was 13, I started hanging around a pretty odd crowd. They were all older than me, smoked weed, etc. The main guy I hung out with, *lets call him tyler* used to smoke me up all the time, I’d sneak out at night during the summer and walk around the neighborhood and smoke blunts with him. Usually, my sister came with me as she hung around the same crowd too. One night she didn’t, and Tyler and I were smoking behind a bunch of trees at the tail end of my yard. He started kissing me and rubbing my leg, we lied down in the grass and he got on top of me as we were making out. We had talked sexually with each other before, and made jokes over text message but had never even kissed to this point. He was touching all over me and at this point my shorts were off. I knew what he wanted because he had told me so many times before, but I didn’t have time to tell him I didn’t want that anymore before he slid my panties over and (gross wording) inserted himself rather forcefully . It hurt, naturally, and I screamed. I screamed more because when it hurt, he went harder and just covered my mouth. He quickly finished and I went inside my house to curl up into a ball in my bed and stare at the wall the rest of the night.

What angers me, is that Tyler was 22. He was 22 years old and I was 13.

I blocked this part of my life out of my head for a lot of reasons. This being one of the main ones. I have told every person i’ve ever been romantic with that I lost my virginity to my first “real” boyfriend when I was 15. And I honestly thought I had until recently when all of these memories from Tyler were brought up.

Looking back, I understand my coping mechanism and I know I was raped. It’s hard to come to terms with that because I remember discussing sexual things with him, and I never said no to him, and I didn’t push him off of me at first, until it was too late to try. But I now am coming to terms with how manipulating he was in our sexual discussions, how I may have not said no but I never said yes either, and I didn’t push away too late, that I have a right to change my mind at any point in time.

All of these emotions flooding back to me in my adult years (I’m now 22) is very overwhelming. I guess i’m posting this to know i’m not alone and that there are other people this has happened to, and maybe it wasn’t realized right away either and you’re having to recipe with something years after the fact.