Cut yourself some slack… if you’re transparent about it, there’s nothing shameful about being young and inexperienced. Where you begin is nothing compared to where you end up.
I was twenty-three when I found an online community of kinky people. I was the youngest person in the group for a while —the others ranged from mid-30s to early 70s— and I remained the youngest guy for several years after that.
Everyone else had doctorates, careers, long-term relationships, and the money to fly to Folsom every year, while I was a nobody with nothing. They ignored my presence at first, mainly because I kept my head down and mouth shut. They only noticed me because I posted a story I’d written for my ex, and a few of the “older women” —25-35 year olds 😂— responded enthusiastically.
(It was a shitty story, but I guess it had a little more style than most. And catching the eye of a girl was a major accomplishment back then, because women generally made up ~30% of online groups.)
As I became confident that I “belonged”, I began speaking up. They were annoyed with my big mouth in the early days, but warmed to me when I demonstrated that I was thoughtful and open to being proven wrong. Four years later, I was the first of us to become convinced this whole “World Wide Web” thing was gonna stick around, and I led a schism that took half the group to a new http:// home that I built for us. By then, the scary 50 year olds were following my lead, and put me in charge.
The community dissolved in the late 2000s, but I’m still Facebook friends with many of those people, and have been living with one of them for over 25 years. I know it’s hard to believe, but youth and inexperience are all-too-brief… both will be gone before you know it.