catsanditalkshit

[catsanditalkshit]

I interviewed the guy who groomed me as a teen - he asked for a current pic

NOTE: All identifying information has been changed for privacy purposes. For the purposes of this article, the person interviewed will be referred to by the pseudonym, “Harrison”.

TW: mention of grooming and grooming tactics but no physical sexual assault

I wrote a version of this once already, but, to be honest, it was too kind for the reality of the situation. For a bit of context, I’ll have to take a few steps back to 2011. 

My friends had feather extensions, were experimenting with a cut crease, and the internet was something that was relatively widely accessible and was a simultaneously wonderful and horrible place. I, like many other Millennials, spent countless sleepovers on Omegle giggling with friends over the people (and things) we came across while swiping through the endless anonymous chats. It definitely wasn’t a place for young girls, but it was a semi-safe way to explore and push the boundaries of what we were allowed to do.

In the crisp Autumn of 2011, I went looking for a new way to push the envelope. I logged on and created a dating profile on an already notorious site - OkCupid. I said I was 18 and that, along with an email address, was all that was required to join. I was flooded with messages despite the fact that I had no picture and a bare profile. I waded through the promises of “a night [I’ll] never forget” and a lifetime of being “taken care of”, but ultimately, freaked out and logged off.

I was 15.

Should I have been there? No. 

Did I tell people I was underaged? Yes. Did they report my profile? No. 

Some of them did tell me I shouldn’t be there though and stopped talking to me, so don’t lose all faith in humanity.  

My OkCupid profile remained active but unused for months while I experienced a few IRL events. Namely a teacher who, looking back, took too much of an interest in me, a friend’s boyfriend who pinned me to a wall backstage until I kneed him, a fellow camp counselor who made sure I knew he carried a knife before cornering me, and a fair few others who took it upon themselves to make their lack of control my problem. Between those experiences and my unfortunate upbringing, I had a rocky relationship with trust, intimacy, and a few other important tenets of healthy relationships.

In the Spring of 2012, I returned to OkCupid out of sheer confusion, naivety, and reckless determination. At the time, I didn’t understand my feelings or what was going on at a deeper level. I knew that I wanted connection, but it didn’t seem like I wanted the same kind of connection my friends did. Years later, I understand that I’m neurodivergent with a complex sexuality, but that journey is a story for another time. For now, it’s all a back-drop for my decision to go on OkCupid and find a man with more life experience to try to explain how things were supposed to actually go. Believe me, now I’m more than aware that’s the last person I should’ve been looking for and the last place I should’ve been looking for them, but hindsight’s 20/20.

Enter “Harrison”. He was one of many who flooded my inbox when I updated my profile to include my interests even though it lacked a picture. He was chatty, seemed kind, and wasn’t put off by the fact that I wanted to get to know him and not just hook up. He was in his 30s and had baggage, but he was funny and shared some of my interests. At the time, I could tell he was lonely and seeking attention, but figured it would suit us both just fine. Within a day or so, I came clean about not being 18. I told him I was 16 going on 17 which, still a lie, but seemed okay because I would be 16 soon and we wouldn’t be chatting that long anyhow ‘cause who would want to talk to a kid? Now, I’ll pause here to say my mind back then didn’t clock how weird a 34-year-old wanting to date an 18-year-old was. I was young and naive and knew he’d probably want to hook-up, but that if I didn’t want to do that, then he would get bored and move on - legality aside. Regardless, Harrison wasn’t angry with my revelation and we kept talking. 

He showered me with compliments and poured an immense amount of time into me. We exchanged Skype usernames and began chatting there. Soon it was near constant chatting with almost daily calls thrown in. At a certain point, he asked if I had heard of an app called Snapchat and whether I’d make an account so we could send pictures without him getting in trouble. I joked that he just wanted me to download it so I would send him nudes since I always used possible trouble as an excuse to not send any.  In reality, I was uncomfortable with the idea of him seeing more than my face because one: I didn’t feel ready for that and two: my body dysmorphia told me no one would love me as I was. He let the Snapchat idea slide for a bit, but would ask for pictures more often - selfies, outfits, anything he could to get me comfortable sharing all intermixed with flirty non-jokes asking for pictures if I mentioned things like getting ready for bed or going for a swim.

Then calls became video calls. He started off saying he just wanted to see my face since we hadn’t met up yet. He even joked that I could be just about anyone if he hadn’t seen me on video yet. This became the new norm. After a bit more time spent getting me comfortable with him, he asked to video chat during a late night call. He didn’t want to just see my face this time. I had seen much more of him, especially during calls where he would turn casual chats sexual while I did homework, and now he wanted to see all of me. 

I put it off and told him I didn’t want to because I was fat and didn’t want him to stop talking to me. He told me it didn’t matter because he was so into me, he didn’t care what I looked like, he just wanted to see all of me. I declined and we stopped chatting for the night. It was the next night that we sat in a video call while I was having a movie night with my family. I sat carefully so that they couldn’t see my screen and just explained it away as a paper I had to finish. We typed back and forth silently with our cameras on until my family went to sleep.

Harrison told me it was late and he was going to head to sleep, but I asked him to wait just a little while longer. I had decided I was going to “be brave” and let him see what I looked like. I still wasn’t ready for what he really wanted, but it felt like a fair compromise to at least let him see what I looked like. From then on, the conversations were less about general, daily topics and more about the things he wanted to do to me, how much he wanted to touch me, and him asking if I could go see him. By this time, my 16th birthday had come and gone and, in talking about the celebrations, I let it slip that I had turned 16 not 17. I vividly remember feeling my blood run cold when he stopped me to ask about it. I thought for sure that he would get angry. Instead, he told me I should’ve told him sooner because it would’ve been even hotter for him had he known I had been even younger the whole time.

What followed was months of calls that dove deeper and deeper into some of his interests that left me feeling sick to my stomach. The more I complied, the steadier his attention was and any resistance was met with him withdrawing and telling me it was clear I wasn’t interested in him and he would spiral into self-loathing episodes. Eventually, the chats petered out as I steadily disengaged with Harrison and how disgusting he made me feel.

Did we ever meet in person? No. 

Did the over a year of daily grooming and engaging in his deviant sexual interests affect my self worth? Absolutely.

That would’ve been the end of it too if it weren’t for the fact that he reached out nearly two years later when I was in my first year at university. He had tried to follow my private Instagram, and I denied it. Then he sent me a message on Skype, which I ignored. Finally, during a night out with friends, I got a message that asked for me to just talk to him followed by a call from him just minutes later. I thought about declining it but figured maybe he would go away if I answered. He told me he had to drive by my university for work and anytime he did, he thought of me and how I made him feel. 

He told me no one had ever made him feel the way I did and no one had since. He told me he still thought about our calls when he pleasured himself. He said that he tried to think of a way we could work out when I was a child; that he had looked into what it would take for us to get married and have a life together - kids, picket fence, the whole nine. He said he wanted, no needed, to know if there was even just the slightest chance for him… to hook up with me.

Feeling all the anger and hurt and disgust I had spent a year in therapy wallowing in bubbling up, I told him no. I told him the truth - There wasn’t a single chance in hell and all the things that got him so hot made me feel disgusted. I only did and said the things I did back then because he wanted me to, and those things made me nearly vomit afterwards. Not to mention the life he wanted wasn’t what I wanted for my future. He seemed heartbroken and told me he’d leave me alone but not before blaming me for how “messed up” his head was and that I had a responsibility to him because he had to think about what he wanted to do with me anytime he wanted to get off. With only a year of therapy under my belt, I told him that what happened in his head wasn’t my responsibility and hung up.

He tried to follow me on Instagram again in my mid-20s - I declined and blocked him for good. 

Well, until last week. In the year 2025, a year shy of my 30th birthday, in a place where I feel safe and I’m working through the countless years of unfortunate experiences, I unblocked him and went so far as to send him a follow request. Within 24 hours, he had messaged me. He opened with a few jokes and spoke about how he was surprised I even remembered him and turned that manipulative charm of his up to 11. Suddenly, it was all about how I had such an impact on him that he managed to remember my name after all these years. All the while, joking about how he hoped he wasn’t in trouble.

I explained I was reaching out with the hope of having a few lingering questions answered. I had a set of 20 questions prepared but only got through four of them. The rest were answered by him in his over-explanatory answers describing his life with his wife who he met and then proposed to around when he reached out to me in university. In that conversation, he was vague, and downplayed his part in things while describing it all as a “loose friendship”, but was reasonably apologetic. I was sympathetic for the majority of it despite the obvious manipulative undertones. In a vacuum, without the context of what was done and said over a decade ago, it seems like an honest mistake; a momentary lapse in judgement. With context however, it’s over a year of daily bad decisions with a child he knew was struggling even if he didn’t understand the extent. 

There was a fair amount of hollow apologies for hurt he may have caused and him not remembering much from that time mixed with accusations of me having dozens of men doing the same things to me at the time, all-the-while saying he only remembers me because he cared so deeply for me. 

The reality of the situation being that yes I was a kid in a place kids weren’t supposed to be, and he was an adult who saw that and took advantage of it instead of blocking or reporting the account. He put the blame on me over a decade later like he didn’t used to video call me while I was doing homework and play with himself on camera and sulk for days and send troublingly sad messages if I didn’t answer or if I didn’t want to join in. I was a kid in the wrong place and he was the adult who saw that and took his time preying on my low self-esteem and promising to be gentle if I could just find a way to sneak out to his place. There were so many individual moments and decisions that he made that took him to where he was, and the simplest path would’ve been to report and block. 

Even without all of that context, as the conversation drew to a close, he wished me well and told me I could reach out if I needed to ask more questions... And then he asked for a “current pic”.

Over a decade and not a single day’s growth.

[catsanditalkshit]

I moved out of the US a few months ago.

Not specifically because of the current political climate (I'm incredibly privileged to be a cis-white-straight-presenting woman so I can hide in plain sight for the most part as long as no one asks for ID), but it certainly helped make the move feel easier. I moved for a ton of reasons that were largely personal, but it all boiled down to: a bitch can't heal if she's always on fire. So now I'm watching my friends and family on fire from very far away, and I have a touch of survivor's guilt despite the fact that they're all safe (currently). This isn't a post about that though, just felt like I needed to acknowledge that I'm starting regular blogging probably because I'm feeling guilty, lonely, out of place or some combination of those. Totally great reason to talk shit about things, right?

I'm nearly a third of the way through my MSc program in the UK and one thing is abundantly clear - group projects suck more than a nun's bunghole. I'd even argue that they suck even more with the advent of widely accessible AI. Now I won't get into the objective downsides and problems with AI or my own personal moral qualms with the way the models are built and trained, but I will say that people use it as a damn crutch and it's annoying.

AI can be such an interesting tool if used correctly and, with how ubiquitous it's becoming, it's important to understand what role it plays in the future of any industry. You wanna know what it's not though? A replacement for doing actual fucking work. Like, genuinely, this group project is not particularly difficult in terms of the requirements themselves, but the group work aspect has made it damn near impossible. "Oh well, Tabi, being able to work in a group means that..." Oh shut your trap, imaginary well-meaning internet stranger. It's gotten to the point where one of these people is about as useful as tits on a mouse and my grade (& consequently my visa) is tied to that person.

So yeah I'm going to talk shit. A lot.

Now, my personal use of AI is limited to asking it to tell me how in the hell to use a machine at the gym or what a tool I've been using to pry open a busted utility door is actually for, so I'm no master prompt-writer. I know there are people who can wordsmith their way into some pretty awesome shortcuts and genuinely useful things, but, at the very least, I think I have a lot of learning to do before I can even consider using AI to help me out (and that doesn't even account for my moral qualms).

I'd like to point out that Mr. TitMouse is definitely not one of those legendary AI gurus. He brings AI-generated work to group meetings that's so generic I'm surprised Walmart hasn't found a way to sue him. It's like he gave the poor AI a two-word prompt and then expected a persuasive dissertation. I can just picture our poor, budding robot overlord asking for a hammer to use, getting a Fisher Price tool set instead, but still doing their best to build what they were asked for.

All that to say: if you're going to do something bad, at least be the best at it. I've spent a few too many drives home ranting about how if he didn't want to work, he could use AI in much smarter ways, but nope this guy would rather do absolutely nothing and then try to mansplain the process to anyone who will listen. I was pleasantly surprised when he offered to do actual work last week, but, upon actually looking at the "work" today, he's basically disregarding everything the group had agreed upon and using his own, barely-formed-enough-to-call-generic drafts to create the least functional thing I've ever seen. I know the other group members are trying but this guy is really dragging everyone down. I'm a glutton for punishment though, so I'm going to let him do his thing, make my own in the background and test both out in the wild to see which people prefer. Is it technically more work? yes. Will it technically save me having to deal with this actual man-child as much? also yes. Will I get a small amount of joy from showing the tutors how absolutely BS everything he's done is? big yes. Maybe I'll even hide a little drawing of tits on a mouse in the final product! Who doesn't love a little easter egg 🤭