u/uselesssomethingg

i was online friends with older men for 5 years, I dont even know if friends is the right word anymore but thats what I called it then, they were much older( like 20+ years age gap) and it was during the time i was 14, 15, 16, 17, at first it felt like being seen like I was special and not like the other kids my age who were invisible to adults, I had something they didnt, I had attention, real attention from people who were supposed to be out of my league, they listened to me and they made me feel like I mattered and they admired the way I think, the thing that probably made me matter was that I wasnt 18 yet maybe, I didnt understand thats what it was, not the way I do now thats just what happened, four years of that caused this, now my body reacts to things I dont even understand and the depression makes me feel like nothing matters anymore because Im not that age, I dont have the energy to explain it better than that, I just know I didnt have these problems before them and now I do

twenty feels like a funeral, because somewhere in those four years I learned something that I cant unlearn, I learned that love has an age limit, that the only kind of love worth having comes from older people who look at you like youre still soft, still small, still young enough to be interesting, I learned that growing up means growing invisible, that the day you turn 19 and 20 the door closes and youre supposed to just walk away, be normal, date people your own age, want things that adults want .

btw Im autistic, I probably spent my whole life trying to decode people, and by the time I realized that older men online were decoding me for the wrong reasons, I was already in too deep . but I dont want to feel that way or think that, and I know I sound really weird right now, Im probably mentally ill

now I watch younger girls, thirteen, fifteen, seventeen, and my stomach twists, not because I wish them harm, I dont, I wish I could protect them, but underneath that theres something uglier, something Im ashamed to admit and no one knows about, Im really really jealous of them, they still have time, they still have that window, someone might still look at them the way I was looked at, but I know, I know, and I know its wrong, I was always really happy to be told I acted older than my age

my parents kept me so locked away that by that time I was starving, not just for freedom but for proof that I existed to anyone outside those four walls, I never got the messy normal alive parts of being young, the sleepovers where you stay up late, the stupid group chats or silly little crushes on classmates, not even a simple hangout with friends in the mall, the feeling of being reckless and a little safe at the same time, so when older men turned their attention on me I didnt see danger, I saw the love that had been denied, it felt huge, I now find myself frozen in front of younger girls, not just jealous of the predatory attention they might get but jealous that theyre still in that age, I want to be younger because I never got to be a kid or teen at all, and somehow in my head being younger than 18 feels like the only way I could ever go back and claim the chaotic unbroken adolescence that was stolen from me twice .
I shouldnt think like that.

20 is too old to be wanted, too old to be special, too old to matter in the only way I was taught to matter

I dont know how to want to be 20, I dont know how to want an adult life when my whole sense of being loved is stuck back there in those rooms with those people who would have dropped me the second I aged out, which they did or they would have or they should have, I dont even know anymore

sometimes I think Im still waiting for someone older to look at me and see something worth keeping, but I wont

so I stay jealous, I stay wishing I was younger, not because I want to be a child but because I want to be loved the only way I know how

and I hate that I know that way at all.