This post forms part of Prostasia Foundation's Survivor Expressions series, a platform for CSA survivors to tell their stories in their own words and own way.

Grover and Fish

I’m Grover (she/her), a young aspiring artist! I love to draw, read, and hang out with friends! Sometimes I like to debate people and research things for educational reasons, I connect my personal growth with understanding people and the world around me. I shared my story because I want people who’ve experienced stuff like I did to know they’re not alone, or maybe to help someone before they end up in the same situation I did. I really don’t want this to happen to anyone else. I also lowkey did it to assure myself that what happened to me was actually wrong, no matter how close me and him were.

It started in around 2016. I was 13 at the time, he was 19 I believe. The timeline here takes place over the span of 4 years.

The year prior I had a sexual encounter that made me pretty uncomfortable with doing sexual stuff online. Not sure where the point where I tossed that aside was, but it was early on.

I’m going to refer to the man in this essay as Fish, because what he went by reminds me of a fish and I remember always threatening to slap him with a fish.

We started out as good friends. I acknowledge that I started out talking sexually with him, looking back on it I realized that it was because I wanted to be viewed as mature. I never liked the fact that I was supposed to be innocent because I was under 18, and I never liked being treated as a kid. Even now I don’t like being treated like a child, but I understand my limits a bit better now.

 
We talked casually about sex all the time, I loved talking about porn and stuff, it was fascinating to me like any other art form except hormones were added to the mixture. 

But then, he asked me if we were to meet up would I have sex with him. I said yes, because I would have sex with any of my friends should they ask. Saying yes to that question is my biggest regret, because that’s what kickstarted all of this.

After I said yes, we sort of started dating. I’m not exactly sure how, but we did. Fish started acting romantically towards me. He started speaking in cutesy textspeak (you know “uwu”, “OwO”, that sort of thing but worse) and roleplaying in our everyday conversation. I played along with the roleplay part, I used to roleplay all the time when I talked to people. Then he started roleplaying intimate things, he’d “rub my belly”, “smooch me”, “touch my breasts”, and “press against me”. I started getting uncomfortable, and I did voice this. He toned it down a bit but it never fully stopped. Whenever I got mad at him for doing stuff like that when I asked him to stop he’d blame it on his libido.

He always used to ask me if we could masturbate together and I used almost every nice excuse I could think of to avoid doing so. I told him it makes me uncomfortable but he always kept asking and asking. He knows how to take a no, I’ll give him that, but he doesn’t know how to take a long term no. He’d ask until I was eventually too sick and tired of him asking to say no anymore.

The thing is that even when we were dating I knew he was doing lewd stuff with my friends at the time. I didn’t really care, but my friends did. They’d complain about him a lot, how uncomfortable he made them and stuff. Whenever I came to him with it with concerns, I’d tell him that he won’t get far if he doesn’t change. But he’d always just say that that’s the way he is, that he’s been like that and supposedly will be.

Not only that, but he was also just a really shitty boyfriend in general. He would always criticize my interests and beliefs. When I said I wanted to get tattoos and dye my hair he degraded me for it because “he wouldn’t like that”. He was stuck up and controlling, so I decided to end it with him.

When I did, I told him that I loved someone else, then he threatened suicide and I got scared. He disappeared and I was genuinely really upset, I started crying and I couldn’t tell my sisters what was wrong.

He did come back and we talked it out, but overall I was angry. I already had issues with guilt tripping, so when he did that I solidified the fact that I hated him for it. It was a wound that would never heal between us.

We became friends again eventually. I talked to him when I was lonely and had no one else to talk to, and he did the same to me. 

Our relationship was just a void of memes and lewd interactions at this point. We were basically just friends with benefits, but eventually it came to the point where we weren’t even friends. We just did lewd stuff and that’s it. It was better than it had been before though, so I didn’t complain much.

I think he sensed that I was no longer really interested in doing stuff with him, so he offered to start paying me to do lewd stuff. I’m a huge sucker for money, so I agreed.

Everything was going fine until one day, where he suddenly asked me if I had told anyone about what we were doing.

With that question, it sort of hit me like a truck that what I was doing was wrong. That our friendship was basically gone. I became distressed.

Eventually, my sister found out about it, she saw a nude I had sent him on my computer and confronted me about it. I tried to lie but I couldn’t do it effectively, it only made her more suspicious and eventually she just took my device and went through my social media herself. She saw everything, brought it up to my other family members, and they went berserk. They filed reports and I think one of them even made a callout post about him.

I pretended to go along with it, but deep down I felt terrible. He had mentioned suicide again when I warned him about my family finding out and I was scared he’d actually kill himself. Also, deep down I wanted to hold onto the last thread of friendship we had, I wanted to hold onto the old Fish I knew and hoped maybe he’d come back, but maybe it was futile from the start. I don’t know.

I find myself missing him, wondering if he even thinks about me anymore, wondering if he valued me at all in the first place. I wanna heal our relationship, I don’t want to just burn the bridge. All of his socials that I know of are gone though, so there’s no way for me to contact him. I always think that maybe if I just tried we’d be able to have a better relationship but… I don’t know. I just don’t know anymore. Everything is a mess. I don’t know whose fault that is, I don’t even know if it’s anyone’s fault. I’m scared and lonely.