I'm scared to write about things that touch on sex and sexual abuse. It's an incredibly confusing topic for me. I was not overtly sexually abused, but sexuality was much more present in my life throughout my childhood than it should have been, thanks to a mother who had no sense of what was or wasn't appropriate for a child to be exposed to. Also, I now understand that my best friend during my pre-teen years had been sexually abused at some point before the age of 10, although at the time she spoke of it as having already had a boyfriend and having had sex with him, which, I'm afraid, was aspirational to me at the time, thanks to having been my sex-obsessed mother's confidante as well as the tag-along to many outings with her and her sex-obsessed mother in which they talked a lot about, well, sex. So I grew up placing an outsized importance on sex. That has led me into plenty of emotional and situational trouble throughout the course of my life. There's still the potential for trouble there. Not like it used to be when I was younger, but, oh yeah, still there.
Further confusion about CSA and what it is results from my relationship with Other, who had some kind of a sexual relationship with a male teacher when he was a pre-teen. I don't know much about it (I don't know many details about his history at all, I realise), but he has mentioned it a few times over the years and has always insisted that it was good and he wanted it, and that the teacher didn't do anything wrong. Aside from my knowledge that his having wanted it and enjoyed it doesn't mean the teacher didn't do anything wrong, I understand why Other feels that way, but I've learned a bit about him this year that I didn't know before, and I've come to feel that it had a much greater impact than he realises.
I hope this isn't offensive to anybody, and marta, I hope you don't feel that I'm hijacking your thread. I have wanted to write about this for a long time and was too uncertain. I never know where I fit in with any of these categories of abuse because everything that happened to me as a child was so weird. My abuse comprised elements of all these things with no obvious pattern to be given a label and connected directly to my dysfunction. Sometimes one of the things I'm angriest at is that I have nowhere for good or ill to "fit in".