I wish I had some discussion or questions to ask that were more positive or something, but honestly I've been desperate to talk to other zoos for a long time and I just need to try and get stuff off my chest.
I realized I was zoo when I was seventeen, and I didn't understand the gravity of it at the time, but it's slowly been tearing my life apart. I feel like neverending, quiet, invisible explosion, and I completely failed the last year of high school even though I was a top student at everything until then. I've been riddled with so much shame and self-hatred that I've isolated, humiliated and harmed myself, along with doing horrible things to myself out of sexual frustration, and causing huge rifts in my friendships until I started fully hiding everything about myself.
I tried some things to get near the animals who interested me, dog sitting, horse riding, even working at that riding school, always putting myself through huge struggle and pain just to spend a few hours around them. The riding school I went to was eighteen kilometres away, I went there at eight and left at five every day for two weeks, and all I had was a bike. It didn't matter to me though, because all of it seemed worthwhile just for that time around them. Yet I never got to be alone, never got to feel safe, and lately I haven't had any way of being around horses at all. No matter how many friendly people I hang out with at college, I always feel lonely and terrified of anyone's company, and usually come home at the end of the day to quietly cry and scream until I finally manage to sleep. I wanted to be alone, so I left my parents and moved back to my home country on the other side of the world from them, but I've ended up with housemates who I can't stand living with but am absolutely stuck with.
I'm sure none of you want to hear my sob story, but I come dangerously close to killing myself at least once a week, and this shame, guilt and loneliness is crippling my ability to achieve anything in life. For whatever reason I was afraid of reaching out to other zoos, too, but somehow I finally found the strength to do it.
I do love what I'm reading hear though. If I can get through this, I really want to become an active part of this community and contribute to efforts to normalize our sexuality. A lot of the ideas here are ones I had thought of too, but had no one to discuss them with and certainly no one to agree with me on them.
I dunno, just, thanks for reading if you got this far.