I want outside perspectives on this because I’ve spent months going back and forth in my own head about it.
In late November 2025, a friend from a sporting community I’m part of called me and said he had concerns about how I interacted with women in the community, specifically one girl from Asia I had been messaging, along with several other women in the community. He told me I was developing a bad reputation and that “this wasn’t the first time”.
The problem was that I genuinely had no idea what he was referring to at first, so I panicked. I apologised to him, to her, and to most of the other women he mentioned, even though some seemed confused by the apology.
The next day I left interstate for my sister’s wedding. About a week later, on December 1st, I received a phone call from one of the major figureheads of the community asking for my side of the story because apparently concerns had spread further. The timing honestly made things worse because I was literally travelling home from the wedding that day and didn’t really have time to properly review the situation and past text conversations.
Between December and February I repeatedly asked my friend for specifics ( 4 times) about what I had actually done wrong. Most of the answers stayed vague:
“people feel uncomfortable”
“you have a reputation”
“this keeps happening”
The clearest example I eventually received came from another community figure in mid-February. Apparently at a training event four months earlier, I had done a trick near two girls walking past and quietly joked “date me”. The girls didn’t hear it, but someone nearby apparently found it uncomfortable.
I said it was intended as a joke and was then told this was “explaining it away”.
Another example involved messages with a 19-year-old athlete from Japan. I genuinely did not know her age at first, and once I found out, I acknowledged it directly in the messages and stopped talking to her.
Things escalated mentally for me in late January when another person told me I could no longer stay with them on an upcoming trip because several people attending felt uncomfortable around me. That was also the moment I realised my friend hadn’t actually kept this private despite originally telling me he was “coming directly to me” about it. At that point multiple influential people and mutual friends already knew, despite me originally being told this was a private conversation. That one message drove me to my first suicide attempt.
I called for help before anything drastic happened but Some people later apparently thought I was exaggerating or “not sad for long enough”, unaware that I had spent two straight days in bed barely sleeping, showering, and stress-eating junk food while spiralling mentally.
Then in mid-February, while all this was still happening, a fake account pretending to be me was created online. Some people already involved in this situation believed I had created it myself for attention or to force conversations with them, despite me having screenshots arguing with the fake account before it disappeared days later.
What continues to frustrate me most is how vague everything stayed. I repeatedly asked:
“What specifically did I do wrong?”
A lot of the time the response wasn’t an answer, but things like:
“You’re still stuck on the past.”
From my perspective, this all happened over roughly two months, so it didn’t feel like “the distant past” to me at all.
I also struggle with the inconsistency of standards.
Years ago, someone else who was openly sexist and homophobic, in this same community made a fake account pretending to be me editing my photos into sexual images, Their behaviour should’ve had them booted yet people acted like he wasn’t doing anything wrong or didn’t care, and continued to train with this guy. Not to mention the drug use I’ve seen in this community too, no one bats an eye about it.
So I genuinely don’t know anymore:
Was this situation handled badly by the people around me, or am I genuinely failing to understand why these incidents were viewed as serious enough to escalate throughout an entire community?
Am I the asshole?