u/redleathercelsiuslvr

I spend most of my time doubting myself. Almost compulsively. I’ve been told I have a tendency to “build cases” against myself like my only job is prosecuting myself. The thing is I’ll never have evidence. They’ll never admit to it and there is no evidence other than my admittedly spotty memory. But I want evidence so bad, I want certainty, I want to know, I want something that could hold up in court even if I never take it there. I feel like that’s the only thing that could make me feel human.

One of the perpetrators in my family isn’t really a perpetrator. He’s very smart and so he’s just been, from my observation, covertly grooming me since I was a teenager. I’m an adult now but it’s still happening to some degree. As much as an adult can be groomed I guess. When does it stop being grooming and start becoming willing participation. I often wonder why I let it go on. He gives me financial support, which is part of it. I also often think it’s because I just like the attention. Which is naturally true, if there’s one thing about me it’s that I’m going to chase attention from any creepy older man I meet. It’s like I have a sense for it. But I think it largely ties back to my need for proof. It’s so awful to say and admit but I think in the back of my mind he’s my last hope for proof. Like if he finally gave up the game and did something about it I would have the proof I wanted and be at peace.

Maybe I’m the problem. I was always the problem child growing up who’s to say the same isn’t true now.

I see a lot of people, both on here and in the real world, say things like “I still live with my parents (or other relative) and I can’t hold a job or get out of bed most days” and I feel bad, of course, because that sounds terrible. But I also don’t feel far from that and it almost makes me envy them.

I live on my own and I have a job but I also don’t have another choice. I have no friends because I’m a generally off putting person who doesn’t do anything or go anywhere because of my chronic and severe physical and mental health conditions. And my abuse was multigenerational and everything in my family either had a hand in facilitating or performing the abuse (besides a few distant relatives that really could not care less about me) so they are very very unsafe for me to be around and I haven’t been in contact with them for years.

So even as I know I’m underperforming at my job and am 5 seconds away from being fired and I’m in pain all the time and I’m miserable and my ptsd is worse than ever I can never just move in with someone for a few years to work myself out and get back on my feet. It’s this or I experience all the same things homeless. I’ve spent a lot of my life couch surfing already and I really don’t think I can handle it anymore. But I also can’t handle this. Sometimes I feel like I can’t handle the world.

I see a lot of people talking about how after being abused as a child they went on to get in a lot of abusive relationships and become a victim more times than the average. I don’t have the exact same experience because I’ve never let anyone close enough and I’m strongly sex adverse and terrified of men. You wouldn’t have even caught me dead alone with a male doctor as a teen and I’m too visually terrifying now for most men that I have to be around alone to try anything. (Please note that I’m not trying to say that this makes my experience better or worse than anyone else’s, this is just how my brain reacted).

That said I do still have some questionable dating habits and it can border on sex work at times (without the sex because I’m terrified of it and with more panic). I have been a victim a few times since then also but nothing crazy. What I’ve noticed, and I don’t know if anyone else has had the same experience, but I attract creeps more than anyone I know in a very specific way.

I have almost never had someone my age (I’m 22 now) and normal interested in me. I’ve had a few stalkers, two different therapists hit on me and one of them ended up being a stalker, and I have this weird thing where I attract men who are older and sometimes have authority over me but in a way where they become obsessed with me and like start rivalries with me before I later figure out that they were just really into me in a really scary way. This has happened with 3 different college professors of mine and 1 that was a college professor at my school just not mine (I dated him for like a month before things started getting intimate and I freaked out and ran out of his house oops lol). It would get so bad that other people, both other students and other professors or random people I knew, would come to me and be like “please don’t be alone with that guy there’s something off there” because they would only talk about me and in really creepy ways. This happened 3 different times. And I’m not an attractive person either, some people say I am but truly I’m not and it has to be about something else because I’ve never seen anything like it before. It’s like there’s something about me that is just magnetic for men with problematic tendencies and I don’t have to do literally anything.

Anyway, my question is have any of you experienced something similar to this? Like you just attract problems and danger and you don’t have any explanation for it?