i basically grew up using the internet, started using it at 8. i was mainly watching youtube and playing moviestarplanet, eventually i found out about chat apps like skype and google hangouts, i even made a youtube channel of my own the first 2 years of me using the internet went fine, i wasn’t targeted by any predators. but for some reason that changed the year i turned 10. towards the end of that year i got another message from a guy who said he was a fan of my youtube channel, right off the bat he wanted to video call me to “show me a toy” (it wasn’t a toy lmao) and being 10, i thought he meant it literally, like a plastic magic wand or something. it took a few days but eventually that guy did end up getting me on video call, he asked me to turn my camera on so i did, he wasn’t talking he was using the skype messages, he called me beautiful, said he thought he was in love with me, and all of a sudden his camera turns on, he exposed himself to me. i ended the call immediately and unfriended him, he kept trying to contact me so i blocked him. that really messed me up at the time, it was so unexpected. we talked for a few days until the call occurred. he called me his friend, said i was the best youtuber in the world, and at the end of it he called me beautiful, which were words 10-year-old me didn’t hear often besides from my family. like most child victims, i blamed myself. i was so embarrassed i didn’t tell my mom for a long time. i don’t think i really knew what happened until my 5th grade class learned about sexual abuse, i can’t remember the specifics but the teacher told us “if someone else shows you their private area, that’s not okay”, that’s when i realized i needed to tell my mom. i did, my mom was supportive, she told me that it was in fact a big deal, she told me that if he contacted me again then we’d call the police (he didn’t, so we didn’t report it, we probably should’ve though.) i didn’t realize it at the time, but it traumatized me. when i got to 6th grade, suddenly it would pop up into my head in the middle of class and i was so confused why. i didn’t wanna talk about it with my therapist because i was so embarrassed. i repressed some details for a while, but last year i found the messages again and it was… definitely something. i couldn’t remember if he knew my age or not, the messages confirmed he did because i told him i was in *fifth grade* at the time. i still have feelings of doubt about my experience, i consider myself a victim of attempted grooming, but i find it hard to relate to other victims, so it’s pretty isolating. i know my trauma is valid though, and i stopped blaming myself. i was just a kid, i didn’t know what would happen.