I Thought I Knew Him

I've had 3 situations where I would consider them some form of sexual assault. The first doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things, but the second time was much more harmful to my mental health and happened a year ago this past Sunday. I've been struggling again this last week with *** and pushing myself to do it even when I lose sleep staying up late to do it. While this is not the main point of this post, I thought it would be helpful context.

The main issue is my former college band director (he quit back in May to move states). He did some *** things when he left, was really petty and it's been a nightmare for the whole band to figure out. I guess what I'm most ashamed of is believing he was a good person. He started texting me pretty quickly after I joined band in January 2022. We were texting and I was just glad I had a person to connect with, he seemed nice and I thought nothing of it. He suggested we start meeting for coffee because he preferred face-to-face talking. I figured it was just fun cause we had a smaller band and he was making an effort to get to know me. We talked up to last May and at that point, he knew he was leaving and started getting more sexual with me over text. He knew I had been having some internal struggles with my mental health regarding my past experiences that went wrong and to put it simply, it was very inappropriate but I went along with it for some reason, I convinced myself it wasn't as bad as I thought even if it made me uncomfortable. So, now with him leaving in a really rude and petty way, I feel ashamed for even letting him get to know me or talking to me sexually like that and for sending things back. It took me at least a month to realize what we had done and to go back through our messages and see what I had "been okay with" at the time. and apparently, he's been weird with other students as well so that's also not reassuring for me or them. I hope they're doing okay.

I think I'm just really ashamed for convincing myself he was okay to talk to in a non-professional way and upset that he turned out to be a completely different person when he quit. It feels like sexual assault all over again, it's really hard to convince myself there are good people out there who aren't just taking advantage of my kindness, my trauma, and my vulnerability.

Thank you for reading if you got this far <3