Adolescence Part 2- Aspergers Blog- Copyright 2013

 Adolescence- Pt2                      Copyright Robert Fullarton

The school put an emphasis on rugby; it had a great tradition of playing in the schools cup, with many of the teachers themselves having been past captains for the senior and the junior rugby teams. So much emphasis was put on the athleticism of matters that I myself felt alienated and engulfed in anxiety when I came or tried to play rugby for the first time. I couldn’t catch the ball, didn’t liked to be touched whatsoever – so I hated the physical contact of the game- I also hated the competition and the almost aggressive, overly masculine stance that had to be adopted for the game. I couldn’t kick a rugby ball, I couldn’t play as a team member and so I didn’t want to play for any of the school teams and so I looked out of place on the field and amongst the sporting enthusiasts from my school. I myself pretended for awhile in my first two years to be on the school rugby team to make my parents happy, to assure them everything was alright- when in fact it wasn’t- it was far from being alright.

When I was supposed to be at practice I would really go off and head home. But this charade was becoming apparent and I told my parents that I had absolutely no interest in playing rugby whatsoever and so I lost another medium for meeting and making friends. When it came to Games and to our PE sessions, I found that I was initially receiving detentions for purposely refusing to bring my gear along. After awhile I decided to run the gauntlet and escape without being seen by anyone. I would not stay for these sessions, which had turned into occasions for me to be bullied or intimidated in some form. How I dreaded those classes, the sheer muck and cruelty of adolescents seems to me in hindsight the worst and most obvious form of ignorance known to me.

My schoolwork was appalling. I entered a special class for people with dyscalculia, to which I suffered taunts from the ignorance and snobbery of the nerds, who used to mock me, nearly implying that I must have been mentally defunct. Of course this was not the case at all, I simply still lived in the old mentality of the child that still lingered within me. The ferocity of peer pressure came with each year that followed and by the end of my first year, the bullying had started and the loneliness had begun. I was mocked to the point of having tantrums and once during an art class I was mocked until I nearly desired to strangle my main antagonist. 

But of course I couldn’t hit him, I was afraid of getting in a fight, I couldn’t stomach the sight or notion of violence occurring and for me to get involved in such matters. So I was defenceless, I couldn’t answer back, couldn’t make a smart comment or even use my intelligence for a defence, because I had no apparent intelligence at the time. I was very much a passive, an utterly unassertive boy at the time. In each subject I had difficulty with the adjustments, didn’t study much for my exams and I wandered the school corridors, waited until the school library opened and searched out on occasion a friend from one of the terribly segregated groups that had been formed throughout the school.

The days were long and taxing. I felt often as if I were a prisoner trying to survive a sentence and a condemnation. I was probably the gullible man among the convicts and that is what it felt like. On many occasion I would try to be like the others, try to seek a newfound popularity and would later even confess my attractions for certain girls to the wrong people and pay dearly by the venomous circles of gossiping and was tormented and mocked daily. In fact I think that some of the girls viewed me as a liability to be around and to such an extent that they believed that I was mentally backward. 

They would often trick me into getting in trouble just so that I could get in trouble, I would pull some stunt for them in front of the teachers, they would laugh and then they mock me to my face. I would of course get into trouble from the teachers themselves and during this period I was so terrified of attending certain classes that I would on occasion play truant from school, would leave through the back gate and even head off into the city centre. 

I even spent time in the toilets trying to hide from facing these problems. French, Geography and sometimes-even history were the subjects, which I later had to endure such torments. I often struggled to find a science partner and nearly had to beg someone to be my partner, but of course this was more debasing experience from which I was ridiculed and laughed at by the ignorant folk of the school! My least favourite class of all had to be Physical education, where my clumsiness and my anxiety came out more than ever and several bullies attended this class. It was the slaughter of my innocence, the Christian being fed to the lions!

 I once stupidly enough in my anxiety had put my tracksuit bottoms on the other way around, rushed out from the changing rooms and onto the pitches and of course my mistake and my problem itself became the subject of a class howl and general chorus of laughter. I laughed it off, but received terrible mockery about it. When I went one evening I wept for hours by the side of my bed, in the darkness and my mother came into me, she held me in her arms and tried to comfort and soothe me. I said her “Mom, what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I have a friend? Why I am so hated. They are so cold to me, everyone is so cold?” This is pretty much what I said in a brief moment of self-realisation. 

She told me about my complaint and stated that it was hard for me to make friends because of this, and said she felt so sorry for me for having to go through this and to be so misunderstood for so long!

But these problems would continue to my detriment and they continue to a lesser extent today. The prejudice of so many ignorant, uneducated people continues for the world’s brightest, for the worlds undermined people who often have a bigger heart than those who point the finger and attach the label on the sufferer!

My father would worry incessantly about my lacking social skills, my inability to socialise and fraternise with young people my own age. He often had grand delusions for grandeur for me, often compared me to others and hoped that I would take up rugby. During these years I ended up joining the local scout troupe and this too was another source of immense suffering, humiliation and psychological trauma. How I hated being compared to the other children on the road, as if my life's aspirations were to be meddled with and decided before I had even made my chose.

I hated having to sell Christmas trees at night, hated having to socialise and hang out with older males and males of a similar age who were entirely interested in sports and I couldn’t compete with the extremes of confidence and the bravado that was engaged throughout my years in the scouts. As I once said to my mother, “I should have a label on my chain that states, part time property of the school- part time property of the scouts!” How I loathed the scouts and the abundance of time that it consumed around scout camp. The only thing I did like was the fact that we got to go abroad and see new cultures and new landscapes and this was the only thing I could tolerate. I was inept at the duties which a scout had to perform and so I was mocked, for being very timid and was winded up constantly until I had a tantrum. I didn’t realise the problem, did come up with a practical prognosis. I had no level of depth, no real awareness and knowledge of things around these matters, so the torment continued.

My only temporary joys came from when I was alone and free with my private time- as a human being and as an individual in nature and as nature- I enjoyed going for walks, but still had no real hobbies. I loved my freedom when it rarely surfaced, but of course when I went off on holiday the same problem occurred, I was coaxed into socialising with those of a similar age and of course I was terrified of the intimidation that came with the “club mentality” of adolescents. I was inundated with pressure all round to be something that was totally and inherently alien to me, and I was encouraged on occasion by my parents to engage in this pretence. I wore the mask and suffered for being something I was not. I felt greatly troubled about being in school and I would hang out with the odd so-called friend but there was no level of understanding on their part, no loyalty and love from their being whatsoever but arrogance and an equally stupid pretence. But unfortunately the pretence continued and I rarely had a moment of freedom from the pressures that bombarded me.

My earliest interests in antiquity and the study of archaic cultures came when I was only 6 years of age. I cannot really remember much about my visit to Knosses in Crete and the history of the damned Minoan civilisation, their mysterious disappearance from classical Greece and the majesty of what remains from their culture and their arts. From an early age I wanted to be a painter and from an early age became enamoured with history in general. I would be possessed with an obsessive demand to see the statues in the museum at Ephesus, which my family when we went for a holiday to Turkey when I was just a seven year old boy and my early adulation for Greek and Roman culture, history and warfare left me until I began my classical studies in school, learning about the myths of ancient Greece, reading and studying up the works of Homer, the campaigns of Alexander by Arrian, Virgil’s Aeined, the plays of Sophocles, Euripdes and Aeschylus. I myself wrote essays on Greek art and architecture, studying the individual formations and the structural basis for archaic, early classical, late classical and Hellenistic architecture. I must admit that the stories of Homer and the myths of ancient Greece have not only set my passion for myths and parables in motion but also been a key to my own interest in psychology and philosophy and this is perhaps the reason for my later love of reading Plato and reading into the life of Socrates and the power of philosophical rhetoric. The works of these great thinkers, dramatists, poets, orators and novelists has indeed been one of the richly furtive backbone’s of modern man’s intellectual prowess and each subsequent generation has benefited from the classical masters of ancient Greece. My only protest against the cultures of Pericles, Alexander and Plato was indeed the wealth and business administered over an industry of state slavery, both for private and collective means alike. I have always loathed the notion of a human to be dispensable to the means of another man, as if men were born into the categories of higher and lower men, all indeed as men like Thomas Hobbes pointed out are born under the bow of nature and are one of nature, as I state myself, it is our nobility of opportunities, our wealth of knowledge towards justice and truth and this is the honest spirit of a good individual.

The birth of my musical adorations came when I was sixteen, when my parents bought me my first guitar. It was a cheap acoustic guitar, but indeed slowly but surely I practised, received lessons and began to learn music notation, tablature, my first chords and songs with jubilation. An awakening took place – my love for music was born- it was one of many new senses in a deepening consciousness that gave me a greater knowledge of the faculties of the human person in motion. I developed this love, nourished it and enjoyed it, but still while I played guitar, often I could not hide the emotional disturbances, the domestic disturbances and the social anxiety, which began to grow within me, day-by-day, year-by-year.

I simply had to leave the boy scouts. After many camps, after many insults, I endured two horrendous nights of verbal abuse, when we were barging near Peterborough in England, on two different nights the abuse continued for hours, as many of the boys simply ganged up on me, laughed and mocked me in turns, even one of the leaders joined in with the rancour. I was proclaimed to be dumb, thick, mentally retarded and every other slur and slanderous insult from the foul mouthed derogatory that came and for years this incident has remained, as rotten as ever- as if it had taken place only yesterday- in the depths of my subconscious mind. Their faces and their insults follow me, and never leave, the abuse riddled me various complexes, burdens, even filled me with anxiety and of course it made me feel very much inferior to just about everybody.

But as I must state time and time again, from the darkest moments of our history, the subtle nuances of change must be worked for. You must ask yourself this, are we really worth this life? Do we deserve life and the desires of our purest nature? Indeed we must question our existence, mitigate and reconstruct out entire existence. For me their criticisms, their folly, gross misunderstandings, ignorance and even hatred has driven me in recent years and recent months to excel and propel myself further, on a path of unseen conquest, making me ambitious, arrogant on occasion and yet also, it has made me want to contrast their behaviour by seeking wisdom and tolerance for others, for those burdened in life and perceived with a negative light for the wrong reasons. It is an act of divine reason to forgive…it is easy to hate…almost a non-human act to forgive the malicious bystander of your youth.

My brother grew into a rebel. I admired his sense of independence, his confidence and self-assertiveness and at this stage in my life, I couldn’t really see eye to eye with him, there were grave differences between us both and there were years between us. His extroverted nature was in complete contrast with my introverted nature. But as I was later to know, we were and always will be the two roads diverging in the forest snow, depicted to perfection by Robert Frost himself.

 At this stage in my life, I felt the first noose around me drop. I had finally left the scouts, took up running at a local athletics club, went to a gym and began to enjoy my first attempts at wildlife watching. But still the harassment and the ostracism, the loneliness and the mockery continued in school, the sheer narcissism of the pupils continued and at this stage my first real female attractions appeared. I stupidly and rather clumsily let my opinions and my tastes be known and to the gossiping carrion of the school it was the subject of great amusement, revelry and laughter. Each girl I ever fancied one by one, was, most definitely the wrong one for me. The pettiness of mundane culture was the sight of those parties that the cliques of my school attended, their selective process of nonsense was affecting me and I think this is when I started to feel my first moments of depression. 

I couldn’t stomach the lie that I was forced to live, more and more faces came out from the dark to criticise and mock me. I had on many occasion tried throughout my life to portray myself as a sort of class clown for their amusement, in desperation to end the torment, I bled and gave myself to the deluded process of having to be “cool” and “popular” these hideous slogans from American, counter intelligent culture. I foolishly followed the wrong sorts and at the age of seventeen started to buy and smoke cannibals, hung out with some of the accusers themselves and yet I felt lonelier than ever, felt life had no meaning and no purpose.