I'm a terrible human being, and I'm severely struggling.

[declangwb1997]

Hi, all.

Okay, so here goes.

I'm a 23 year-old man with Asperger's Syndrome, and I've been experimenting with my sexuality since being 18, having had no prior contact in any way. Initially, after my first sexual encounter, I explored 'sexting' through the 'kinky' communities on the Amino app, through 'role-playing' with young adults like myself.

I watched the tamest pornography from the age of 13 1/2 onwards till being 23, yet always had moral issues with it - I'd never fail to get emotional over recognising the humanity of the women and men in these videos - ".....This is somebody's daughter/son!", is how I'd think, even though everybody was a consenting adult.

I'd feel irrationally guilty every time I watched a clip, feeling as though I wasn't a 'real feminist'. This would lead me to clean obsessively around me, to feel better.

This is tied into - and emblematic of - my lifelong OCD, and specifically, the pure-'O' that I've experienced since mid-2019 - I'd see only moral absolutes, no nuance.

So, in my later teens/early twenties, I went on a few dates and enjoyed the company of the women I'd been with, yet consistently felt as if I'd prefer just being their friend, as a new friend was really what I was searching for, having not made one since the end of high-school (aged 16, in 2014).

Also, due to my special interests being somewhat obscure, I always found myself having no kinship with my peers, and so I found it hard to sustain even an acquaintanceship.

This was in spite of me trying as much as possible to ingratiate myself into the interests of my peers, so as to better understand them.

I later made a new friend in 2019 who lives close to me, and formally abandoned dating apps then.

Later on, after an online relationship that failed due to a lack of emotional reciprocity, I began to feel what little semblance of a labido I once had fail, to the point where I felt no longer sexually attracted to anybody. Now, I'm pretty certain that I'm asexual.

This conveniently fits in with my life-plans of not having children or a long-term relationship (both of which seem very stressful).

All of this said, I've been endlessly ruminating on what constitutes sexual harrassment since the 17th June 2021, after being mentally reminded of awkward attempts at flirting that I'd participated in.

Since then, I've read so much about MeToo & Time's Up (as I have done since 2017), made a list of sexual misconduct behaviours to 'check-off', and looked at a dozen + forums online about sexual harrassment.

The instance I'm worried about specifically is a time in the summer of 2020 (before I realised that I was asexual), where I found a woman's blog on Tumblr who had been asked sexual questions by men, and had responded somewhat positively.

I thought, "Maybe she'll respond to me, if I send a question!", and because I wasn't as confident as the other men, I asked a three-letter double entendre/innuendo, followed by a question mark.

Here, I was trying to mirror the confident sexuality that women have shown me in person and online.

A lady recently said to me on Reddit that it was the equivalent of making an awkward attempt at flirting in a bar/tavern, and as long as I backed off immediately whenever I noticed their lack of interest (as I did here, and have done prior, always), then it's not harrassment.

Maybe she's correct, in the sense that in a real-life situation, elements that were absent on the Internet would be present, such as prosody/intonation, body language, facial expressions, etc.

Her reply made me feel a bit better, but I still feel like a bad person who is akin to Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby.

I feel awful that I might have hurt a lady, but I also wonder if this is just my OCD 'making a mountain out of a molehill'. I'm not trying to gain help on courtship, since after this long journey of self-discovery, I've unsurprisingly realised that I'm not at all 'kinky' or interested in sexual relations or romantic relationships etc.

I'd just like to reflect on my past actions and be able to walk into the future with a clear conscience, so I can still call myself a feminist and be an ally to women and a good human being.

My mother agreed with my suggestion I have an 'overactive conscience' (a line from Frasier), so I don't know if I'm just worrying about literally nothing, or if I'm a dreadful human.

I don't want to kill myself, but I feel compelled to if I'm a terrible harrasser.

[discuccsant]

Didn't we discuss this already, where I was even warned by the moderators, because I somehow made fun of this very incident? Well. Do you really want me to get banned?

Jokes aside. You seek out for reassurance, which you really shouldn't.

OCD just throws more and more at you. I even told you, that as long as you're going to reason with your OCD, you will suffer from even more past events, because your OCD forces you to ruminate over your past. Things, which are long forgotten and have absolutely no relevance anymore, will pop out from nothing, even though you didn't give them a second thought back then. Now you're going to fix this, then another incidents pops out from your past, and you try to fix this. And at some point you get back to the intrusive thought, where it all started from. A never-ending cycle.

So what should you do? How about identifying OCD as the real issue here and not these silly events, which makes you think you are some kind of perpetrator? Really though. Forget about these events already. Your OCD is the problem. Not them!

You really need to break the pattern and just accept everyone's answers to your stuff, even if you feel anxiety spikes here and then and where you have this need to be reassured. No! Don't give into that. You already got reassured. There is no need to get more assurance on that. In fact, at some point the reassurance isn't enough anymore, as your OCD finds way more illogical reasons to make you believe, that you are in fact exactly that, whatever you fear. It will get worse and worse. It will never get better this way! You really need to ignore it. No reasoning with the intrusive thoughts at all.

It's actually the WORST idea to reason with your OCD, if assurance simply didn't work. Like, okay, sometimes people want a second opinion. But you already got several opinions on that. Yeah, it also sometimes helps to move on. But in your case, it's very obvious that this is just text book OCD, where no reassurance is going to give you the escape from all of this. So no, you can't fix that like others would fix it by getting satisfied with reassurance. No reassurance will help you, and you NEED to understand this!

Focus on your OCD. And to beat OCD, you need to be able to identify OCD and break the patterns. Maybe read yourself into OCD and how it works. Understand the meta concepts behind it and then try to beat it that way, without going into detail. That's the key to beat it, actually.

And it will go away. Trust me. It's super easy, objectively speaking. Why don't you give it a try this way?

Also seek out for professional help if you can't do that by yourself, please. I'm also concerned about the topic title. Please, have a talk with your mother about your inner feelings and get yourself help as fast as possible. There is absolutely NO reason for you, to even THINK about suicide because of all these events. Not one reason!

I wish you the very best, buddy.

[declangwb1997]

Hi again, man.

Thank you again for your help, and your continued patience with me, I really appreciate your help.