I think I might be becoming a bad and miserable person because of my past. Recently a lot of people are being exposed for manipulating a child or person, and I started to think back if I ever did such thing. I think I did as a kid, but Idk. When I was a kid, sexting or virtual sex was a thing ( there was no nudes or anything very explicit, it wasn’t that far. Kid would just pretend to do the sex thing). It was very common ( it might have not been for you, but I would see this in video games) for some reason, and I was kind of into it but weirded out by it. I’m glad kids nowadays don’t do that anymore, but when I was a kid I gave it somewhat a try. It’s weird to explain, but this is what happened. I was about 12-14 years old, I don’t remember what age, but all I remembered is that it was the start of me going through puberty. I played this game called “second life.” It was a virtual social game, where you meet up and hangout with people virtually. It’s like vr chat, but not vr. Anyways, a girl invited me to her virtual house. I quickly accepted it invitation because...you know... I was a kid and my mind was like “oh my god, I finally have a online gf” I entered her virtual house, and we were playing truth or dare, then got bored. (I’m sorry this is we’re it gets weird) she asked “now what?” And then I asked if she wanted to go to the bedroom. She said sure. My heart was beefing fast and I was aroused because I felt like I had a gf ( when I say gf, I don’t really mean gf, it was a think kids would say when they hung out with a girl) and I never did this before I think, I hope it was the first and only. (This is very weird ik) This is we’re things got sexual. Once we got there, you know....think you know we’re it was headed. I asked if she has a emote dance that can re-enacts the doggie style. She said yeah, and we did the disgusting thing. I don’t think we said much of anything sexual because weird kids and we’re scared to type anything sexual. I might be wrong I don’t remember much of the conversations. All I remember was that we just had our avatars do the actions and just watched. 30s of that weird disgusting thing, and my arousal then climaxed. I freaked out when I climaxed. I started to realized this was a weird and disgusting thing. I was mostly scared of the climax because I felt like it was unnatural. I was scared of what just happened, and so I quickly told the girl to stop. She stopped, and I idk if she asked why or anything. I was too weirded out and just said “I have to go. Bye” she said ok. And I left. I deleted everything. I deleted the game and swore to never touch that game ever again because I thought it was evil. I think I also delete other social games that had similarities to that game. I never wanted to ever interact with a person online because that experience felt very disgusting and regrettable. Years later, I a 16 year old, find out about YouTuber manipulating underage fans. And I see my little cousins talk about their online bfs and gfs. I remember the disgusting situation that I took part when I was a kid. The I started to get scared. What if that “gf” was way younger than me? What if I manipulated her and I caused irreversible physiological damage? The whole interaction from when I was invited to the end of the interaction lasted only like 5-10 mins, I might be wrong though. I feel very horrible and miserable. I have no idea who the other person is that was the first and last time I ever interacted with them. I think I might have asked for their age, and it was my age, but I don’t remember. Maybe they were my age, and so that’s why we continued to be “bf and gf” during the interaction (not really big and gf, it a thing kids used to say) I feel bad for the other person. It felt like we both liked each other, but the possibility of the unknown age gap scares me. I feel like I did no damage to the person because it ended very quickly, but the possibility that I did still whispers to me. I’ve been starting to hate myself recently because of this. Maybe I deserve it, I have no idea. I don’t know how to look at that situation. I could make the argument that we were just two dumb kids who did something stupid or It could be seen as me manipulating and hurt someone. I don’t know what to think of it or how to feel. I now am starting to believe my existence should not be allowed to continue. I feel like I am not allowed to be happy at all. My family invites me to do fun stuff and hangout with them, but I reject their offers because I feel like I should just rot in my bed. I never felt very miserable and it hurts, but I feel like I deserve to be hurt. I might not deserve anything good I get in my life for what I might have done to the person. This might be the first time I ever spoke about this. I need some guidance in my life. What are your thoughts about all of this? Have you ever been in a similar situation? How should I feel about the situation? Am the evil person who hurt someone or were we both just dumb kids? Anything will help me. I’m going to tell this to my therapist m, but I feel like she might not help me. I feel likes it a “you screwed up your life” type of situation. Anyways I hope you have a great day wether you hate me or not. Thank you if you have read this far?

So, back when i was 18, i got involved in an online art/rpg community through instagram. We would make characters, draw them, join group chats and talk about our characters interacting with each other- if was chaotic, but fun, and i got hooked. Eventually, as the group kept growing, people started making different discord servers, each surrounding different stories with over-arching plots, and everybody would develop their characters and have them interact. Imagine a mix between DnD and a collaborative novel. I started dealing with severe OCD when i was about that year, in the depths of quarantine, and these servers became an escape for me. There was one in particular that was very involved lore-wise, and i was very deeply invested in because one of my characters had a romantic arc with one of the server hosts characters. It wasn’t until i started dealing with POCD when i began to have issues with the server. The issues begin with the fact that the age range of people on the server was very wide, ranging from high school to college aged. I believe the youngest person in the server was about 13, but i didn’t interact with her much. I was homeschooled and i have younger siblings, so i’ve never had a problem with having younger friends- growing up, i had a best friend who was 2 years older than me, and through high school until just recently, my best friend was 2 years younger. That friend was actually in this art community as well, i got her involved during quarantine. The point being, i never even considered that having younger friends might come off as creepy. There were definitely inappropriate jokes being made in the server, but i tended to roll my eyes and brush them off. As far as i recall, i never made any myself- i didn’t even dare to start swearing until i was 21, i’ve always been a bit of a rule-follower- but my best friend did make suggestive jokes on occasion, and i would laugh, and now i worry that i goaded her on. There was one specific occasion where the two of us, along with a few other people- i don’t remember all of them, but one was my age, 19, and another would have been about 16 at the time- ended up in a separate discord chat, and they were all cracking jokes about creepy discord mods, calling each other “kitten” and being generally icky for the shock factor. I remember being very uncomfortable at the jokes being made, and i believe i even said so, but in a lighthearted “omg stop” way, when i should have just left. There were a few similar instances where people got a little too comfortable, and i just put up with it and laughed along instead of leaving, which i very much regret. The community eventually started to fall apart. Drama between members was the main reason- the server owner called another adult member out, saying some of her characters had ships with characters belonging to minors that were too explicit. This whole thing was shocking to me. i talked to both of them, considered them both my friends, and didn’t know what to believe. Looking back now, i very much think they were both in the wrong- the server had a “NSFW” art channel that you needed a special role to access, but the owner had set the age requirement to 17 instead of 18 because a younger member whom she was close with had asked her to. I believe i was told this secondhand by my best friend, who always knew more drama than me, and i had marked it as strange, but shrugged it off because it wasn’t my friendship, and i wasn’t in charge. I also have a tendency to trust the judgement of literally anyone else over myself, so if i did have any doubts, i would have brushed it off as my overthinking things. The server died eventually- the owner disappeared, so the plot couldn’t progress further, and i’m pretty sure there was a lot more drama going on that i wasn’t privy to, which is fine by me. I was in therapy while a lot of this was going down, so i told my therapist a lot of it- at the time one of my main concern was another adult member about my age who had gotten too comfortable making sexual jokes with one of the high schoolers, and i did eventually message him and ask him to be more mindful- he did agree that he had been out of line and promised to be more careful in the future. It’s been about 3 years now since i left the community- i still keep in contact with a couple people, but i’ve parted ways with the majority. However, i’m still absolutely wracked with guilt over the entire thing- i was friends with some of the minors, too. There was one friend, 3 years younger than me, whose character was going to have a romantic arc with one of mine at one point. I remember warning them that my character was asexual as a way of warding off any weirdness, and i think they might have made some joke back about their character “not having time for that anyway” though i can’t clearly recall. They also really liked one of my other characters at one point, and would make flirty comments about them- i can’t remember what i said in response, probably some form of “they’re flattered”. I worry so much that i might have encouraged it, and that makes me predatory. Most of my guilt comes from the fear that i’m guilty by association, that being there at all makes me a creep, that i should have said something sooner or just left. Another part of me doesn’t even fully believe that the server owner or the other girl she was fighting with were bad people- i was friends with them, we were in the same online spaces for years! It’s so stupid, but i genuinely compared my own behavior to theirs, used them as a measuring stick to make sure i wasn’t doing anything wrong when my OCD started raising alarm bells. To this day, i still can’t tell if i’m blowing things out of proportion. I know i need to be in therapy again- this has been weighing on me so heavily recently, making me feel nauseous and doomed for literal days at a time- but i could really use some outside perspective. That RPG used to be such a comforting form of escapism to me, but now just remembering it makes me feel vile. i feel like i need to go back through all of my old chats and make sure i didn’t say anything gross to anyone, but i’m so afraid of what i might find, the thought makes me ill.

so, i’ve talked here before about the discord community i used to be in. they were rpg servers, there were adults and minors both in the community, and while there were rules against NSFW, jokes were definitely still made and lines were crossed. i was 19 at the time, and though i’m fairly certain i never made and explicit sexual jokes or remarks, i was still there when others did. my best friend did make suggestive jokes, and i still laughed. i didn’t leave. i feel guilty and tainted and like this is the end of the line for me- i have a following and an online career, and it feels like all of that is going to go up in smoke, because i didn’t realize that being friends with young teens as an 18-19 year old could be weird, or risky. i feel like this is proof of every bad thing that i’ve worried i am. if i could be there, and be okay with all the things that were said and joked about and just ignore them, what else am i capable of? i love my life, and my family. i don’t want them to see me as a monster. my mom thinks i’m making a mountain out of a molehill, but i don’t know if i agree with her. i’ve looked at other cases of people who have been cancelled for being inappropriate around minors online, sending inappropriate photos or making jokes and their entire lives go up in smoke. Is that me? they’re labeled every horrible thing under the sun. did they just not think? I don’t know what i’ll do if people believe that about me. my worst fear feels like it’s coming to life before my eyes after lying dormant and tugging at the back of my mind for almost 4 years. I fought the urge to re-read old chats for that long, but i finally gave in, and while i still haven’t found anything i said or did that could be considered incriminating, i remember new things every time the last worry starts to settle. I tried to log back into old instagram accounts to check old chats there, and remembered i’d already deleted them in a panic, so now i’ll never know, and it feels like the fact that i felt guilty enough to delete the accounts at all is incriminating enough. I don’t think i can ever move past this. i don’t deserve to be here- i’m actually a monster, and i ruined my life before it even started.

I’m a 23 y/o female who has recently entered a phase of obsessive thoughts of mistakes I’ve made, ranging from events that happened over a decade ago when and I was a kid up to things that happened recently. I feel so much debilitating guilt I can’t do anything or function. I especially feel bad for this one instance. I have always had extremely low self esteem, and I often seek attention and validation especially from men. I like being liked. I find myself trying to act or look cute, or even act somewhat like a pick-me, so that I feel liked. I feel like I may even do this with girls too, but especially guys. I just really like attention, and I’ve been in a stagnant 6 year relationship where I don’t really feel desirable, and I’m very lonely. A few months ago I started playing a game where I met a large group of people and we would all play together everyday. One of the people in particular was a 15/16 year old guy who flirted with me a lot, and I kept my distance because he was so young, and I felt kinda weird talking to someone younger than me, but we would still talk sometimes because we were apart of the same discord group, and I have a problem being stern and confrontational so I didn’t want to be mean or make things awkward in the friend group. Although it made me uncomfortable that he was so young and that I’m nearly a whole decade older than him, and I did make it clear that I was dating someone and I was way too old for him and I would tell him to stop, I wasn’t very stern and I was very lighthearted about it and I even found myself liking the attention I got from him. I was flattered. I liked that he liked me so much even though I knew he was a teenager and I feel like I was maybe even seeking attention from him like I did with the other guys in the group. And when I say seeking attention, I mean that I was acting cute so that I was liked and got attention. Is that considered flirting? Was I flirting with him? Does this make me disgusting? That I liked the attention I got even though he was teenager? That I acted cute around him as well as all the other guys so that he would like me? I feel disgusted with myself. Does this make me a predator? Doesn’t this make me disgusting that I liked attention I got from a teenager? To be fair, I like the attention I get from any guy. I just like feeling liked. But I feel like it makes me disgusting that even though I knew he was a teenager I still liked and was flattered by the attention and was possibly even seeking it out from him. My head is all messed up. I really feel like I’m having an identity crisis. I feel disgusted with myself to the point that I’m nauseous. I’m so ashamed. I’ve been crying nonstop for days on end and I feel truly hopeless. I don’t know how I’m supposed to live my life with this shame and that I’m convinced that makes me a predator or a sick person. I don’t know if I’m overthinking things or not. I just really need some relief because I feel like I’m losing my mind, but I want someone to be honest with me about my actions.