For me, it began not with curiosity, but with intrusion.

I was thirteen.

It was a sunny Sunday afternoon. I had just said goodbye to a classmate after a math revision class for the college entrance exam. I was walking alone.

A stranger stepped towards me.

His penis was exposed — erect — deliberately directed at me as he moved closer.

I froze.

Until that moment, I had never really seen an adult man’s body. Not like that. What rose in me was not curiosity, but shock — a sharp sense of intrusion, followed by a nausea I couldn’t explain, as if something had been forced into my sight, into my body, without my consent.

I didn’t run. I didn’t change direction. I didn’t look at him again. I kept walking straight past him, as if my body had decided before my mind could catch up.

At the crossroads ahead, my legs began to shake. I dialled the police with trembling hands. I didn’t wait for them to arrive. I just needed to make the call — to prove to myself that what had happened was real.

I never saw that man again.

But the moment stayed with me.

Later, I learned that sex could also arrive quietly — carrying excitement, but very little reflection.

A few years later, sex appeared in my life in a very different way.

My best friend from high school moved to the US with her family. One day, she called me from across the ocean, excited. She had a boyfriend now — someone from her school.

It was night where she was. After they had been out drinking, they took a taxi home together. The back seat was dark, the windows reflecting nothing. The driver was focused on the road.

In that darkness, her boyfriend’s hand slipped slowly beneath the waistband of her jeans and touched her vulva.

She told me there was a moment — brief and quiet — when everything else seemed to fade. The sound of the engine, the road outside, even the driver in the front seat. What remained was only the sudden awareness of her own body, her racing heart, and the feeling that she had crossed an invisible line.

It wasn’t fear.

It wasn’t shame.

It was the pure emotion of encountering something new — something that could, for the first time, be called sex.

Not fully understood. Not yet defined. But undeniably real.

When she spoke, her voice carried excitement, curiosity, and a soft pride — as if she had just discovered a secret about herself.

And perhaps, in that dark back seat, she had. 

And sometimes, sex begins with pain — and ends with silence.

Still at school, I had a friend one year below me.

She was dating one of my best male friends in my class — a boy known for drifting in and out of relationships, and for drawing the attention of younger girls.

One day, she told me she had agreed to follow him into the boys’ toilet. They had sex standing up, inside a narrow cubicle.

It was her first time.

Afterwards, she told me she was in pain — not unbearable, but persistent enough to worry her. The pain came and went over the following weeks, leaving her uncertain about what was normal and what wasn’t.

She tried to talk to him about how she felt. Not to accuse, not even to explain — just to be noticed, to feel that what had happened mattered. But the attention she hoped for never quite arrived, or at least not in the way she imagined it would.

They broke up not long after.

When she told me about the pain, what stayed with me was not only the pain itself, but everything around it — the uncertainty, the waiting, the quiet adjustment to the absence of care. At the time, none of us had the language to call it anything. It simply became part of how sex first entered her life.

Ending

This is what sex looked like for me when I was young. They are like fragments, yet somehow, they feel whole.

Looking back, I realise none of us were ever taught how to understand them.

None of these stories is about right or wrong. They are about how early, how quietly, and how deeply sex enters our lives — often before we have words for it, before we understand consent, before we know how to care for ourselves.

So I want to ask you:

What was your first memory of encountering something you would later define as sex?

Was it confusing, thrilling, frightening, or quietly ordinary?

And do you think it left something with you — a belief, a fear, a pattern — that followed you into the rest of your life?

If you feel like sharing, I’d love to hear your story.

Team 18