David’s story: frightened pedophile teenager

David paints a detailed and vivid picture of how it feels, as a lonely, frightened teenager, to slowly come to the horrific realisation that you yourself are ‘a paedophile’:





    “I remember exactly when it started. I had just turned thirteen and was doing an important exam. I remember sitting in the school hall with about 100 other pupils and like everyone else I was nervous and looking around to see if I knew anyone for moral support. As I looked around my attention was somehow drawn to this particular guy, I didn’t know him but something seemed odd about him and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I could recognise that he was a handsome guy but there seemed to be something a small bit more interesting about him. I looked over once or twice during the exam a  little puzzled but afterwards I didn’t really think anymore of it but still, anytime I was asked during the summer ‘how was the exam?’ I thought to myself ‘wasn’t it odd that I thought that guy was odd?’





    When I joined a new school, to my surprise, the guy I thought was ‘odd’ was there as well. As time went by and I settled into my new surroundings and got to know new people and started making new friends, I began to notice this guy more and more. It got to a point one night when I was in bed that I started thinking about him and suddenly out of nowhere I imagined kissing him! I remember it well because it sent a shiver up my spine as I thought to myself that this was certainly not right. What worried me most was not so much the fact I imagined kissing a guy but the fact that it seemed to feel nice. The fright of it put it out of my mind and I vowed never to think of it again. Besides, I like women, they’re sexy and imagining being with Pamela Anderson felt nice too.





    But now, not only was this guy in my school and my classroom, he was also in my social group of friends. I soon enough started to figure that I had an attraction to this guy because I was starting to have sexual fantasies about him. They felt really nice but I knew there was something going very wrong. I made sure that I never looked at an attractive guy, I learnt very quickly to always casually look the other direction to the point where it became almost second nature to me. After a time, I could see by the way classmates and friends interacted with me that it seemed no one could see it in me at all, and I started to relax a little. ‘I’m not gay, I’m just straight and confused’ I thought. ‘It’s just hormones and all I have to do is wait until they calm down, I knew I wasn’t gay!’ That held me up for the rest of the year.





    As I turned fourteen I was still in the group of friends with the guy I was attracted to. His presence was an uncomfortable reminder of what was wrong inside me. As time went by the ‘hormone theory’ defence was starting to wear thin and I started to consider that perhaps maybe this is it, maybe I am actually gay. For the vast majority of my time I just basically ignored it and just got on with life. By the time my fifteenth year came around ‘hormone theory’ was hanging by a thread and I guess the shock of having homosexuality in the first place had started to wear thing. I reckoned if those hormones were going to ever settle down they would have settled by now surely. I started to slowly accept that I had homosexuality in me; I guess it’s not the worst thing in the world. I was still attracted to women but it only seemed about 75/25. At some point I decided to end the remaining conflict and worry inside me. Basically it went along the lines of a compromise, I said to myself ‘right, I accept that I am seemingly stuck with homosexuality, so here’s the deal, Homosexuality, you can go over to that corner and fantasise about whatever you want and I’ll go over to this corner and live my life through heterosexuality the way I want and well just pretend we never met, full stop’. I still felt a little cheated but there didn’t seem like there was any other way of dealing with it. Life went on as normal and as time went on it just didn’t seem to matter as much as it used to, I became used to it and as such it was easily ignored.





    I felt happy enough as I turned sixteen. But something had changed. As much as I was peacefully ignoring homosexuality, I couldn’t help but make a number of strange observations. Observation number one was: why is it that the couple of guys in my classes that I always thought seemed attractive, are now definitely not as attractive as they used be? It seemed very odd. Observation number two was: if I’m gay then why is it that I’m not attracted to Brad Pitt? I can see he’s a very handsome guy and I’ve heard he’s a gay idol but now that I take a look I find that I have no attraction for him or in fact any adult male no matter how good looking. Observation number 3: disturbingly, why is that the only guys who do seem attractive are the ones aged around twelve or thirteen? In fact, they seem more like boys than anything else. I started to get a very bad feeling that something was going very, very wrong. The more I looked at it the more worried I was getting. I simply didn’t know what or why this was happening to me.





    That was the year when Father Smith hit the front page of every newspaper my parents brought home with them. A new evil was born from an inferno of horror and fear and its name was Paedophilia. I had never heard that word before that. Father Smith was a paedophile and, as the newspaper explained, a paedophile was a person who had an attraction to children. Father Smith had sex with young boys. The only people I seemed to be attracted to were boys. At first a wave of utter disbelief and confusion passed over me. There is no way on God’s green earth I would do anything like the horror Father Smith perpetrated on those boys. I started to think that whatever Father Smith had it must be different from what I have. I mean, why did he do those things? Why would you hurt any boy? It simple didn’t make any sense whatsoever. As the weeks and months passed by I read every article about paedophilia from the papers my parents brought home. I made sure I was very careful no to let my parents or anyone else in my family see me read these articles. One Sunday, in an in-depth investigation of paedophilia, the newspaper finally explained why people like Father Smith were so cruel to children. Paedophilia is an ‘incurable psychological disease’ it wrote, and it is only a matter of time, circumstance and opportunity before a paedophile strikes his victim.





    As the realisation of what this meant set in, it started to drawn on me that paedophilia, as a disease, must be like a cancer. A cancer of mind. What I knew about cancer was that it’s a disease that starts off very small. So small you wouldn’t even know it was there. As time goes by it begins to consume everything around it to the point that by the time you find out you have it, it would be, more or less, too late to do anything about it. Then it would kill you. I realised that paedophilia had started off small. I didn’t even realise I had it all this time. I thought it was homosexuality. I’m only sixteen now and that’s why I’m still a good person but as time goes by paedophilia would slowly consume all that was good and decent inside me, then it would only be a matter of circumstance and opportunity before I start rapping, beating and destroying boys too! I would become as evil as Father Smith. There will be nothing I could do to stop it. Every night these thoughts would circle my head time and time again. Fear started to grow slowly at first but very surely. ‘Something is coming’ I thought. Some kind of remorseless and shameless joy from raping and beating innocent boys.





    Night after night alone in my bedroom fear was growing and growing. I could feel it. There was such a hatred for paedophiles being expressed by every newspaper and the thing about it was, they were right to feel that way about Father Smith and people like him. People like me. I suddenly realised at this point, that everyone in this life, my friends, my family, my mum and dad, all hate me too, its just that they don’t know it yet! I started to feel isolated from everyone around me. To feel alone in this world, to face a battle with a cancer I might never win.





    To walk around with a worried face or to act any differently would draw questions from parents, teachers or friends. Questions I most certainly had no answers to and a personal issue I could afford no one in my life to find out about. When I was around people I literally reverted back to my normal everyday self. What I thought was homosexuality had already trained me to do this. I felt and displayed no fear or concern to anyone and dealt with everyone and everything the way I would as if this thing didn’t exist.





    At night-time, however, when I was alone in my room, that’s when Pandora’s Box would open and all hell rode out from it. How anyone could live with the same of sexually abusing boys is one question. But how could anyone continue to live with the shame of knowing they are destined to destroy boys is quite another. I asked myself ‘is it right for me to continue to live knowing what ill end up doing to boys in the future?’ I felt the answer but didn’t say it. Suicide had already entered the equation. Suicide brought with it the absolute, guaranteed and undisputable fact that I would never in this life harm even one boy, ever, full stop.





    I knew that if I didn’t find my way out of paedophilia and soon then I was going to die by my own hand. The search was on. I didn’t remember anyone around me ever talking about it even though I tried to listen for it. I went back into the newspapers reading and rereading the articles, trying to ‘read between the lines’. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for but I thought I’d know if I found it. But as time went by there was a gathering sense that I wouldn’t find anything in the newspaper. I had read these papers for over two years now and the stories were always the same, time and again. I was slowly losing hope that id find something to save me. Suicide was with me night after night. As the weeks went by fear was ebbing away to the sorrow of slowly accepting my fate. I had done everything I could, I’ve done the best I can, I’ve explored all the options. There just wasn’t any way out.





    I started to think more about the concept of suicide and what it meant. It meant I was never going to hurt any boy, guaranteed. Then I began to realise that what I was going to do through suicide was to actually save boys and anyone who actively does something to save another, specially children, is called ‘a hero’. The term ‘a paedophile’ means ‘a destroyer of children’. But I’m going to be saving boys not hurting them. It means I’m not ‘a paedophile’ in any way, shape or form. While it’s clear beyond doubt that no one in this life could ever love ‘a paedophile’ it is, however, just as clear that everyone in this life certainly loves ‘a hero’. Everyone loves a hero! Everyone loves… me! Of course they do! Everything was perfect. Everything was beautiful. Everything made brilliant sense, all questions answered. Suicide isn’t a decision, it’s an understanding. A perfect understanding. The next day when I left my room I was walking around on a cloud. I could barely keep the smile off my face. Everything felt so different, so bright. The horrific disease had gone so I could find no fault within myself and therefore no fault in anyone else either. Everything was perfect. After a couple of days of walking around feeling great I knew the time had come to plan how I was going to commit suicide. In my room that night I settled down to the task of finding a way to commit suicide.





    There seemed to be many ways to do it, from drug overdose to walking in front of a bus. I quickly enough generated a small list of priorities that a suicide must fulfil. Priority number one: it must at all cost be guaranteed. Priority number two: it has to be quick. Priority number three: if possible it has to be painless. The best way seems to be slitting my wrists with a razor in the bathroom. This seems perfect. It’s absolutely guaranteed beyond doubt, it will take five minutes maximum, it’s quick and of course the deeper the cut the less the pain. Now that I had picked the method and the place it was now time to set the date. I chose a date about a month and a half away. All I had to do now was to sit and wait. I sat there on the eve of the appointed day with the razor in my but I just couldn’t do it!





    While it most certainly wasn’t the last time I came close to suicide in those first few years, no other time had such an impact on me. My psychology had collapsed and I emotionally and logically flat-lined with no more ability to function than to just show people what they wanted to see so I could get to the end of my day and disappear under the pillow. The story from that suicide attempt to now is one I would call a slow rebuild of personal ideology and understanding of how my life works.”

    (Extracted from Sarah D. Goode's book "Understanding and addressing adult sexual attraction to children")