Nicholas Gomez's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing"
I'm Still in Denial (My Experience with Sexual Abuse)
Morning comes and Sabrina goes.
The phone rings.
Mom’s calling.
We haven’t spoken since the whole dinner debacle.
I pick up.
Hearing her voice again feels weird. It’s become difficult for me to see and think of her as my mother. The only visual of her I have left is from when I turned around to yell at her that things aren’t always about her. She was crying, panicking, really. It reminded me of breaking up with my high school girlfriend at three in the morning in a foreign state, when she dropped down to her knees and said she wasn’t going to move unless I took it back. Sure it was dangerous leaving her there, sobbing on the sidewalk of a poorly-lit street, but she was no longer my responsibility.
The same goes for my mom, except that she was never my responsibility.
And her throwing a fit like that was a perfect reminder of how selfish she is.
But we still talk. Try to, at least.
What starts out as an attempt to understand one another quickly turns into stubborn arguing. She defends her point of view and I defend mine, both of us thrown back to that night, to those feelings.
I don’t tell her that it wasn’t all internal, that I was hurt when they passed on my suggestion for going to an improv show. I don’t tell her that I was enraged because of how little they seemed to care about getting to know Austin from my point of view. And I don’t tell her that when she and my sister decided to go shopping at an antiques bazaar instead of finding something all four of us could enjoy, I felt forgotten about, the same way I felt forgotten when I found out at seventeen that my parents had been separated from the time I was four, or five, I still don’t fucking know. When I asked my siblings about it they laughed and said, “You didn’t know?”
Maybe now I can look back and I too can laugh. I’d moved to a different country and left my dad behind for a year. Then I moved back in with him and lost my mom for the rest of middle and high school. It should’ve been obvious, and part of me knew, “OK, clearly my parents don’t live together anymore. They must not like each other.” But my mom convinced me that the reason we were leaving Mexico was because her teaching job at the high school turned into a nightmare. She couldn’t stand it any longer. So maybe mom and dad were just deciding it was best for their relationship if Mom followed her dreams elsewhere.
I know it sounds goofy to hear that, but I was eleven, man, I wasn’t supposed to know what a healthy relationship looked like.
And because my parents never sat me down to talk about it, I isolated myself for the next seven years. I dated several girls they never found out about because I was afraid of what they would think. I found dead cigarettes and ashes floating in my mom’s toilet even though I’d never seen her smoke a cigarette in my life. One summer break I visited my dad and watched him and a woman’s silhouette scream at each other outside my brother’s bedroom window. I still don’t know whose silhouette that was.
I watched everyone get better and better at keeping secrets and learned to keep my own. Often I would get home from school hours before my mom and my brother. I had the house to myself and loved using that time to explore my sexuality. I put a tampon up my ass one day and watched it pull out blood when I came. I wore my mom’s heels and thought of what it would be like to be a woman, to be wanted so easily.
When my brother and I moved back to Cancun I started masturbating on camera for strange men all over the world. I slept in the same bed as my dad, but had my own area of the apartment during the day. It was the first thing you saw when you walked in so the masturbating happened late at night, after both of them were sound asleep.
It was a learning process, but eventually I found a chatroom for gay men. You were allowed to create your own username and short bio. Mine would always be:
YOUNG BOY SEEKS DADDY/MASTER
Dozens of men would message me as soon as I joined the chat, all of them asking the same thing. How old was I? At first I lied and said I was eighteen ‘cause I knew I’d get away with it. Then one night someone asked if I was really eighteen, said it was OK if I was younger. So I told the truth. I told him I was thirteen.
Just what I was looking for, he wrote.
After that I gave him my Skype name and let him boss me around through text.
Take off your clothes.
I looked over at the rest of the apartment, no door in my area to give me privacy. I took my clothes off and immediately got hard.
Start touching yourself.
I started rubbing my cock up and down.
Ten minutes passed.
Are you close?
I told him I was.
I want you to come in your mouth.
I was one of the smartest kids in my physics class but when he asked me to do that I had no idea of where to start. So I asked him for help.
Find a wall.
I found a wall.
Point the camera at the wall.
OK.
Stand on your head with your ass against the wall and aim for your mouth.
I looked around the apartment again, dead quiet. All one of them had to do was get up to pee and they would find me naked, jerking off in front of my computer camera. How would I explain that?
It didn’t matter. That wasn’t going to happen. The adrenaline was too much for rational thought to stop me.
So I sat with my ass against the wall and pulled myself up with my feet, inch by inch, until I was high enough that my head was resting on the pillow I’d propped on the floor. Blood rushed to my face. My cock was throbbing. My audience was pleased, rewarding me with degrading insults about what a little slut I was.
But they were here with me. They wanted focused alone time with me the way none of my other family members did. I felt so strong and in control knowing how much they wanted me.
I closed my eyes to avoid getting come in them and opened my mouth and came all over my face and neck. It was the first time I tried my own come. I got off the wall and back to a normal seated position. I cleaned my face with a rag.
Every time was slightly different than the last because every man has different fetishes. Some wanted me to take my time stripping; some liked it when I used my microphone to talk like a submissive boy should. But all of them ended the conversation the same way. As soon as I came, they would come too, and then disconnect right after. I never knew if I would see them again until the next time they reached out to me. And by then I almost always had someone else in line.
When I got all the come off and finally opened my eyes again, the call had ended.
So when I realize my mom isn’t listening to me, I end the call and go searching on Craigslist for someone who will.
-----------------------------------
I was sexually abused when I was thirteen.
But I have a hard time accepting that I was.
What you just read is one of many encounters I had with older men at the age of thirteen. Around 2009 when I moved back to Mexico from the Bay Area to live with my dad, I was given a freedom that none of my friends had. My dad owned his own business and thus worked days, nights, and most weekends, too. I owned a computer and a sexually curious mind. I also didn’t have anyone to talk to about the shit I experienced.
And I experienced a lot that year.
I met a seventh-grader that invited me to his parent’s beach resort two hours from Cancun and then proceeded to serve me shot of tequila after shot of tequila—thirteen of them altogether. I blacked out and woke up with the worst hangover I’ve had to this day.
I was in a car accident that resulted in two months of crutches and a lifetime of dental work—a literal lifetime.
I fell in love and got my heart broken twice in the span of four months.
I walked from my dad’s apartment to a grocery store nearby and got a homeless man to go inside for me and buy me condoms.
The list goes on and on.
The point is this—I was basically moving through the world having to reconcile things on my own as a thirteen year old. And I was pretty fucking sad through all of it. So, when I ran out of ways to cope, I turned to the internet for answers because, after all, the internet had taught me how to masturbate, how to win money playing online poker, and how to build real-life friendships in the online videogame world.
I turned to the internet but also to my sexual curiosity. I had seen enough movies about depressed teens that did the same so it wasn’t hard to research different chat rooms and start my voyage down the rabbit hole.
As soon as I found a website that allowed me to chat with real humans, I didn’t care whether they were men or women—all I cared about was the attention. And boy did I get A LOT of it.
Guys were messaging me left and right asking to chat privately. They wanted to know my age, my location, and my sexual interests. Most of them didn’t know I was a teen because I was smart enough to know that that would make our chats illegal. The ones that knew were the ones that insisted on knowing the truth. And at that point I thought, well, illegal is just a word grown-ups throw around the way my teachers tell me that wearing a baseball cap in class is “against the rules”. Illegal sounded stupid and boring.
But telling them the truth and doing something that I knew was considered by most to be “wrong” was exciting.
Do you get where I’m going with this?
For me to sit here and say that I was sexually abused feels almost like saying that when I lost $1,000 dollars on an online poker bender I was taken advantage of by the website that I played on. At thirteen I was very aware of what I was doing—THAT’S WHY I WAS ABLE TO DO IT WITHOUT GETTING CAUGHT!
Now, I know a lot of this is my own ego trying to stand his ground. “I must have been so goddamn smart and street savvy that I chose to do those things. I wasn’t sexually abused! I knew I wasn’t old enough to give consent where consent was needed, so if I was aware of the implications, how could it possibly be abuse?”
I still have those thoughts sometimes. That it wasn’t what everyone says it was—that I wasn’t sexually abused just because I was under age when I allowed men in their fifties and sixties to boss me around on my webcam. And maybe the scale doesn’t lean one-hundred percent in either direction.
Sure, maybe I can accept that I wasn’t old enough to make those decisions. But does that also mean I have to ignore the fact that I played a part in it?
I once heard a quote that went something like this:
“If I was hit by a drunk driver I would blame myself.”
I’m not saying I wasn’t victimized. But to move forward with my life and decide not to view myself as victim is a choice that I get to make. And that responsibility undeniably falls on no one else but me.
The phone rings.
Mom’s calling.
We haven’t spoken since the whole dinner debacle.
I pick up.
Hearing her voice again feels weird. It’s become difficult for me to see and think of her as my mother. The only visual of her I have left is from when I turned around to yell at her that things aren’t always about her. She was crying, panicking, really. It reminded me of breaking up with my high school girlfriend at three in the morning in a foreign state, when she dropped down to her knees and said she wasn’t going to move unless I took it back. Sure it was dangerous leaving her there, sobbing on the sidewalk of a poorly-lit street, but she was no longer my responsibility.
The same goes for my mom, except that she was never my responsibility.
And her throwing a fit like that was a perfect reminder of how selfish she is.
But we still talk. Try to, at least.
What starts out as an attempt to understand one another quickly turns into stubborn arguing. She defends her point of view and I defend mine, both of us thrown back to that night, to those feelings.
I don’t tell her that it wasn’t all internal, that I was hurt when they passed on my suggestion for going to an improv show. I don’t tell her that I was enraged because of how little they seemed to care about getting to know Austin from my point of view. And I don’t tell her that when she and my sister decided to go shopping at an antiques bazaar instead of finding something all four of us could enjoy, I felt forgotten about, the same way I felt forgotten when I found out at seventeen that my parents had been separated from the time I was four, or five, I still don’t fucking know. When I asked my siblings about it they laughed and said, “You didn’t know?”
Maybe now I can look back and I too can laugh. I’d moved to a different country and left my dad behind for a year. Then I moved back in with him and lost my mom for the rest of middle and high school. It should’ve been obvious, and part of me knew, “OK, clearly my parents don’t live together anymore. They must not like each other.” But my mom convinced me that the reason we were leaving Mexico was because her teaching job at the high school turned into a nightmare. She couldn’t stand it any longer. So maybe mom and dad were just deciding it was best for their relationship if Mom followed her dreams elsewhere.
I know it sounds goofy to hear that, but I was eleven, man, I wasn’t supposed to know what a healthy relationship looked like.
And because my parents never sat me down to talk about it, I isolated myself for the next seven years. I dated several girls they never found out about because I was afraid of what they would think. I found dead cigarettes and ashes floating in my mom’s toilet even though I’d never seen her smoke a cigarette in my life. One summer break I visited my dad and watched him and a woman’s silhouette scream at each other outside my brother’s bedroom window. I still don’t know whose silhouette that was.
I watched everyone get better and better at keeping secrets and learned to keep my own. Often I would get home from school hours before my mom and my brother. I had the house to myself and loved using that time to explore my sexuality. I put a tampon up my ass one day and watched it pull out blood when I came. I wore my mom’s heels and thought of what it would be like to be a woman, to be wanted so easily.
When my brother and I moved back to Cancun I started masturbating on camera for strange men all over the world. I slept in the same bed as my dad, but had my own area of the apartment during the day. It was the first thing you saw when you walked in so the masturbating happened late at night, after both of them were sound asleep.
It was a learning process, but eventually I found a chatroom for gay men. You were allowed to create your own username and short bio. Mine would always be:
YOUNG BOY SEEKS DADDY/MASTER
Dozens of men would message me as soon as I joined the chat, all of them asking the same thing. How old was I? At first I lied and said I was eighteen ‘cause I knew I’d get away with it. Then one night someone asked if I was really eighteen, said it was OK if I was younger. So I told the truth. I told him I was thirteen.
Just what I was looking for, he wrote.
After that I gave him my Skype name and let him boss me around through text.
Take off your clothes.
I looked over at the rest of the apartment, no door in my area to give me privacy. I took my clothes off and immediately got hard.
Start touching yourself.
I started rubbing my cock up and down.
Ten minutes passed.
Are you close?
I told him I was.
I want you to come in your mouth.
I was one of the smartest kids in my physics class but when he asked me to do that I had no idea of where to start. So I asked him for help.
Find a wall.
I found a wall.
Point the camera at the wall.
OK.
Stand on your head with your ass against the wall and aim for your mouth.
I looked around the apartment again, dead quiet. All one of them had to do was get up to pee and they would find me naked, jerking off in front of my computer camera. How would I explain that?
It didn’t matter. That wasn’t going to happen. The adrenaline was too much for rational thought to stop me.
So I sat with my ass against the wall and pulled myself up with my feet, inch by inch, until I was high enough that my head was resting on the pillow I’d propped on the floor. Blood rushed to my face. My cock was throbbing. My audience was pleased, rewarding me with degrading insults about what a little slut I was.
But they were here with me. They wanted focused alone time with me the way none of my other family members did. I felt so strong and in control knowing how much they wanted me.
I closed my eyes to avoid getting come in them and opened my mouth and came all over my face and neck. It was the first time I tried my own come. I got off the wall and back to a normal seated position. I cleaned my face with a rag.
Every time was slightly different than the last because every man has different fetishes. Some wanted me to take my time stripping; some liked it when I used my microphone to talk like a submissive boy should. But all of them ended the conversation the same way. As soon as I came, they would come too, and then disconnect right after. I never knew if I would see them again until the next time they reached out to me. And by then I almost always had someone else in line.
When I got all the come off and finally opened my eyes again, the call had ended.
So when I realize my mom isn’t listening to me, I end the call and go searching on Craigslist for someone who will.
-----------------------------------
I was sexually abused when I was thirteen.
But I have a hard time accepting that I was.
What you just read is one of many encounters I had with older men at the age of thirteen. Around 2009 when I moved back to Mexico from the Bay Area to live with my dad, I was given a freedom that none of my friends had. My dad owned his own business and thus worked days, nights, and most weekends, too. I owned a computer and a sexually curious mind. I also didn’t have anyone to talk to about the shit I experienced.
And I experienced a lot that year.
I met a seventh-grader that invited me to his parent’s beach resort two hours from Cancun and then proceeded to serve me shot of tequila after shot of tequila—thirteen of them altogether. I blacked out and woke up with the worst hangover I’ve had to this day.
I was in a car accident that resulted in two months of crutches and a lifetime of dental work—a literal lifetime.
I fell in love and got my heart broken twice in the span of four months.
I walked from my dad’s apartment to a grocery store nearby and got a homeless man to go inside for me and buy me condoms.
The list goes on and on.
The point is this—I was basically moving through the world having to reconcile things on my own as a thirteen year old. And I was pretty fucking sad through all of it. So, when I ran out of ways to cope, I turned to the internet for answers because, after all, the internet had taught me how to masturbate, how to win money playing online poker, and how to build real-life friendships in the online videogame world.
I turned to the internet but also to my sexual curiosity. I had seen enough movies about depressed teens that did the same so it wasn’t hard to research different chat rooms and start my voyage down the rabbit hole.
As soon as I found a website that allowed me to chat with real humans, I didn’t care whether they were men or women—all I cared about was the attention. And boy did I get A LOT of it.
Guys were messaging me left and right asking to chat privately. They wanted to know my age, my location, and my sexual interests. Most of them didn’t know I was a teen because I was smart enough to know that that would make our chats illegal. The ones that knew were the ones that insisted on knowing the truth. And at that point I thought, well, illegal is just a word grown-ups throw around the way my teachers tell me that wearing a baseball cap in class is “against the rules”. Illegal sounded stupid and boring.
But telling them the truth and doing something that I knew was considered by most to be “wrong” was exciting.
Do you get where I’m going with this?
For me to sit here and say that I was sexually abused feels almost like saying that when I lost $1,000 dollars on an online poker bender I was taken advantage of by the website that I played on. At thirteen I was very aware of what I was doing—THAT’S WHY I WAS ABLE TO DO IT WITHOUT GETTING CAUGHT!
Now, I know a lot of this is my own ego trying to stand his ground. “I must have been so goddamn smart and street savvy that I chose to do those things. I wasn’t sexually abused! I knew I wasn’t old enough to give consent where consent was needed, so if I was aware of the implications, how could it possibly be abuse?”
I still have those thoughts sometimes. That it wasn’t what everyone says it was—that I wasn’t sexually abused just because I was under age when I allowed men in their fifties and sixties to boss me around on my webcam. And maybe the scale doesn’t lean one-hundred percent in either direction.
Sure, maybe I can accept that I wasn’t old enough to make those decisions. But does that also mean I have to ignore the fact that I played a part in it?
I once heard a quote that went something like this:
“If I was hit by a drunk driver I would blame myself.”
I’m not saying I wasn’t victimized. But to move forward with my life and decide not to view myself as victim is a choice that I get to make. And that responsibility undeniably falls on no one else but me.
