u/redvelvetw0und

So I have a plan to try and figure out what happened to me. I have no idea if it will work.

I’m going to try and consume a bunch of media from the time my mind blocked out. Video games I played as a kid, songs that my parents played in the house a lot or just ones that were popular at the time, shows and movies I watched back then, looking up pictures of toys I used to play with as a child. anything to try and jog my memory. i feel like the most likely outcome is i don’t remember anything still but I just age regress a little and let my inner child have a good time, which seems pretty harmless. but hopefully it can help me figure out the gigantic hole in my memory. but I’m also afraid of that happening because clearly my mind wiped all that shit out for a reason? but at this point, the uncertainty is destroying me. I feel like knowing if it happened or not would be a relief.

has anyone done something like this? did it work? if I do remember things, do you have any advice to cope with that? thanks for listening.

I’m certain I experienced CSA as a baby at the hands of my babysitter because it’s corroborated by other people even though I can’t remember. I have a strong suspicion that it happened again at the hands of my father growing up, but all memory of him (and only him) before age 12 is completely inaccessible for me. In all of this trying to remember and figure it out, something that happened in my teen years I’d pretty much forgotten about came back to me, and I’m not sure if it “counts” or not, because as disgusting as this sounds, I sought it out myself, and like, i played stupid games and won stupid prizes i guess.

When I was a teenager, my parents heavily limit my access to social media because they were afraid of the internet (still are, to this day they don’t even have facebook or anything like that). They were also lazy and technologically inept, so they weren’t aware of many social media apps outside the big ones everyone talks about and were too lazy to look em up. This enabled me to get creative and only use apps they’d never heard of, and this was like the early-mid 2010s, so the apps I ended up on were kik and whisper (which is like the worst 2 places I could have ended up maybe). both were CRAWLING with predators but at that point I was a teenager and was being abused at home for how my body looked (my dad hated me for gaining weight. my first memory of him when my memory kicks in aged 12 was him slapping food out of my hand and screaming for half an hour about how fat i am) and bullied at school for it on top of it. it was to the point I developed an ED for awhile. and i did something to cope that I’m not sure if it counts as online child exploitation or not because it was deliberate on my end.

I knew they were weird old creeps. i knew they only wanted to see me because i was 14 or 15. but I just needed a male figure in my life, preferably one around my dad’s age, to tell me i was pretty. that my body was adequate and not disgusting. it was partially fueled by the ED, but mostly fuelled by just needing validation I guess? The only reason I was fortunate enough to not be exploited worse was because I was deliberate and careful. when I sent naked pictures of myself to these freaks, I’d edit out the background, I’d crop my face and hair out of the picture, i’d photoshop out any identifiable scars or moles or anything. I made it so nobody could ever prove it was me, and nobody could blackmail me with it. This is why I question if this even “counts” as me being exploited, because there was clearly forethought about it on my end, and as much as it was coming from a place of just absolutely being in a hellish mental state and desperate for any crumb of validation from a pseudo-father figure, and as much as i was literally a young teen, I still asked for it. I still did it on purpose.

I’d do it with boys my age too. which is so weird because it turns out I am actually a lesbian. I just was so fucked up about needing to be pretty to men, even though I was sexually repulsed by them. I even engaged in some very shameful and exploitive kinks to make myself more desirable to both them and these online freaks, which I’m absolutely mortified about, and it also ruined a decently healthy coping mechanism for me (age regression, because between all this shit and also the weird melanie martinez culture of sexualizing baby things at the time, I got groomed into thinking i was a “little”
like yeah no shit i was “little” i literally WAS a child technically. now i’m so ashamed and disgusted by that that it’s taken like a decade for non-sexual age regression to be a viable coping mechanism again)

Is this another instance of CSA that I’m remembering as all of it starts to come back,
Or does it not count because I did it on purpose and clearly was self aware enough about it to completely anonymize myself in pictures?

I can’t remember my dad before the age of 12. When I still lived with him, I couldn’t remember much of my childhood at all, and I just shrugged it off as normal forgetting and kid brains being bad at remembering shit. But now that I’m out and I’m safe and away from him, I’ve come to the realization that that’s not even true. I remember everything and everyone else. not like EVERYTHING everything, but a very normal amount of childhood memories. I even remember super inconsequential people, teachers at my elementary school who weren’t my teacher who I only ever saw in passing, members of my dad’s band who were only in the band for a short amount of time, their wives and their kids, friends of my cousins, hell, people I just met at the park and hung out with as a kid. But when I try to remember anything about my dad, pretty much everything is completely blank. which is super weird, because I know for a fact I lived with him my entire life up until last year, my parents never separated (still haven’t), he was always there but there’s just. nothing. or close to it anyway. an entire category of information just wiped out.

I can count on one hand the memories of him I have. one is him tickling me until I peed myself even though i was crying for him to stop when i was about 3. another is him inviting me into his bedroom when my mom wasn’t home (my parents always had separate rooms because my dad smoked in his room. I was allowed in my mom’s room but not my dad’s) and making it seem like he was letting me do something cool and against the rules. Don’t remember anything that happened in there other than sitting on his bed and watching some lame history channel show, american pickers or pawn stars or some dad-slop tv show like that. I vaguely remember him teaching me how to play a D chord on guitar and then giving me a box of everlasting gobstopper candies and then taking me to the park when I was like 7 or 8, but i don’t remember HIM i just remember his hands touching my hands to make the chord shape and hating the feeling and him handing me the box of candy, and then being at the park. and the last one isn’t even a memory it was a recurrent sexual nightmare I had about him where I was trapped inside him as if he had a womb while he laughed in a gross way and told me it was the only way I could grow up. it would flash behind my eyes a lot as a kid and I could never sleep after because the image would be there every time i blinked. in all of these memories, he never has a face. it’s just gone, or scribbled out, or out of frame. i remember his body more clearly than his face, which is super weird. And that’s it. That’s all I remember from 12 years of living with him.

For context, he was emotionally abusive from the time my memory of him kicks in at age 12, so maybe it was just more of the same when I was younger? but the fact he’s just totally blanked out, that I can’t remember him no matter how hard I try, coupled with a laundry list of CSA symptoms I’ve shown in my life that I won’t even get into because this post is long enough already, it FEELS like something happened. I thought about begging him to tell me what happened, rehearsing the conversation alone in my room, and my legs started shaking violently. ive had multiple instances recently of waking up in the middle of the night with a full-body dread sensation saying “it happened” in my sleep clear as day, and just an overwhelming feeling of that statement being the truth, but then as soon as I get my bearings I’m like. “what? what is the “it” in question that I know happened. I got nothing!” and then going back to sleep. it’s driving me actually nutso bonkers fr. I just wanna know what the fuck happened man. how do you stitch a wound you can’t even see? how can I trust myself when it’s just a whole entire category of information that got wiped and no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to remember shit.

does anyone else deal with this? does anyone else have experience with overcoming it and actually being able to remember and figure out what even happened? any advice or replies would be really helpful and appreciated. thanks for reading.

this is kind of silly and nsfw, sorry. Last night, i think I might have came so hard I had a seizure? I was using a vibrator and also had taken some edibles (naybe that contributed somehow? not sure), and when I reached orgasm, it’s like I lost all control of any of my muscles and i started convulsing and spasming violently. I’m not talking about legs shaking or “quivering” or whatever, I mean full-body convulsions, like all of my muscles were spasming uncontrollably and I was aware/conscious the whole time but I felt almost trapped in my body because I was frozen other than these completely uncontrollable movements I couldn’t get to stop. afterwards my whole body hurt and felt sore and buzzy. it wasn’t even really pleasurable after a couple seconds it was mostly just scary and exhausting.

I wanted to ask other women/people with vulvas if this is something that happens to them too, or if this is something i should (with great embarassment) bring up to a neurologist (which I’m already waitlisted for). they do suspect that I have temporal lobe epilepsy, but i’ve only ever had focal seizures, this was the first time it was my whole body jerking uncontrollably. essentially i’m just trying to figure out if this is a normal crazy thing vulvas can do or if this is my potential epilepsy getting worse