sort of important if terrifying

[redthedragon]

i almost forgot
me birthday is like... in four days and then ill be able to see the porn on here again


honestly? im a moron. i don't really regret it but like....

listen you ever lie? and then you go, oh, i can't back down from this lie, no way, not at all, and then you kind of lock yourself into it?
and then you keep going?

i started telling people i was eighteen when I was like... hitting the end of sixteen, iirc. i tried to make my age as vague as possible. mostly because people on tumblr, being like they are, had a tendency to tell me that my girlfriend was terrible and abusive because i was turning 17 and she had turned 18 a couple months before. anti's don't care about relationship dynamics. and i was really, really tired of getting that from every direction, or seemingly every direction, because before I remade my tumblr account I joined a few fandoms that had a tendency to "crab-bucket" and, being a mostly innocent and extremely isolated fourteen year old, I didn't realize that I was getting trapped in some genuinely horrendous thought patterns for. um. a while, lmao.
so i made up a lie about my age! and i stuck to it!
and then
and then i made fadom friends.

the trouble with this
is that all of my fandom friends
were over 18
and wrote smut
and posted smut on their blogs
(I also wrote smut; i was reading smut at age 14 and writing smut by age 16 and drawing sexually explicit straight up porn when i was 13, before i even discovered Tumblr or A03 and was still reading slash-lite eragon/arya fics on FFN. none of that was new to me)
but because the site was listed as 17+
these people. almost exclusively. wrote that they were 18+. several would make a point of blocking underage followers, and I-- a brave but somewhat inconsiderate fool-- decided that I was allowed, because I was "18". I kind of just assumed I would be a silent observer, because I did not make friends in my former fandoms. I feared the people in them. Because they were primarily fear-mongering anti type individuals, and I knew that I was not the kind of person they tolerated.

but the TF fandom is not like that.

the parts of the TF fandom that I inserted myself into is actually incredibly chill.

and so I made fandom friends

based on a lie

and if I came clean about that, then I worried I would lose these friends because I was too young, I had lied to and decieved them, and I just... well.
I kept doing it.

and so the lies propogate.

Recently, as in about a week ago, a server I was in for whump writing kicked me out of the NSFW and "dark and gore" channels because they found out I was underage. I, at this point almost exclusively writing explicit torture and rape stories about my one character because that's the story that I have at the moment, flipped my lid about this, sort of.

but like. i've been thinking.

and I guess I just. kind of have to be out with it?

I'm turning 18 on the twelfth. I'm not 18 yet. I'm a liar who lies, and almost every other minor I know online does the same thing. But I really hate duplicity. It makes me feel guilty, and then there's the fact htat nothing can stay hidden forever.

consider this my confession.

it's up to you guys now, I suppose.

whatever you do in response to this, it's your prerogative; I lied to you guys for a long time. It's only fair that I let you guys get to make that choice.

now im gonna go run away and hide lmao this is, how do you say, SCARY
im very bad about being honest about things after a certain point

Comments

[yvannairie]

:/

The thing about this particular lie is that in several districts in the US (the region that matters most because even us who don't live there are subject to those laws because we used US-based services) it is a crime to share sexually explicit and obscene material with minors, comparable to sexual harrassment, especially if it happens one-on-one. You've put people in danger with this lie for years, essentially for a thrill, when you know very well you could have asked to not be included in sexually explicit channels, no reason given, and not have shared sexually explicit material sent to you, especially in one-on-one conversations.

Then again, nobody knows my true age online either, people assume it to be anything from 21 to 35 and that's fine by me. You don't need a reason to not want to share your age, and I don't blame you for being pulled into this, trying to avoid gaslighting about your own relationships. I sympathise on that count. And I've done my fair share of "lol pfff sure I am" clicking through an "are you +18 and do you want to see sexually explicit material" prompts, too, b/c it's safer for queer youth to explore sexually online than anywhere else. Especially in fandom. Where nobody has to know your age.

But frankly, you deserved to be kicked off those channels and you would have deserved to get kicked off that server. And if you lose people's trust because of this, that's also entirely deserved because by propagating this lie (especially when in private) you've shown yourself to be less mature than your age suggests. You've disrespected their boundaries and you've shown yourself to be unreliable, and whether they can forgive you for that is their prerogative.

[redthedragon]

Oh, no, trust me. I know that that was fair and I wasn't trying to argue that it wasn't.

Furthermore, I... didn't get pulled into it? Or gaslit? I made the active choice to present as over 18 so I could lurk in adult spaces, and then progressively felt guiltier and guiltier as i actually got to make friends and stuff with people in said 18+ spaces that I had only expected to lurk in. I just want to give people a chance to make a decision one way or another about me without being misled, if you get me?

To be fair, I didn't realize there were laws against it up until around last week, at which point I started trying to make a decision about whether or not to post something like this. The last thing I would want to do is bring legal repercussions down on the people who kept me happy and entertained for the past few years especially if because they were lied to and didn't realize what was going on, which is... pretty much exactly the scenario here.

[yvannairie]

Oh, I don't think you were making excuses :') I sympathise with your circumstances, is what I meant -- you went about protecting yourself, but you were protecting yourself in a way that was short-sighted and wrongheaded. Your mistake doesn't delegitimise the pressure you were under.

[kalydon]

Hey. I'm. very late to seeing this. But I think you know that I get it considering how long I lied to my family about everything. I also did the same thing with saying I was 18 when I was like. 15. cause I really wanted to RP with my one friend.

I didn't know you were having such an emotional time about it though, and I'm sorry that I didn't notice. I also didn't know you were getting bullshit because I'm a little older than you and that. makes me mad, honestly.

I love you.