Adolescence Part 3- Copyright- Robert Fullarton

 Adolescence Part 3- Copyright Robert Fullarton 2012

I was surprised to have discovered my sex drive, did not know much about it, but an over ridding lust rose up in me. Of course I viewed this energy as a toxic sludge, a waste, a dirty act and felt severe scrupulosity over these nocturnal acts and obsessions that came with them. This too was another drug, for me to adhere to, to hide the crises that faced me and face the pain that resided throughout my being. But the first step for us to treat a condition, a dilemma, a crisis of any kind, is the acceptance of our struggle to get around it. We must accept the hindrances of our nature, whatever we call them – “weaknesses” and “strengths”- we must examine the problem itself, rebuild and begin again. Perhaps this is almost equivocal to what Kierkegaard once stated that we must live life backwards.

I have since come to believe that sexual love is a complete limitation- a temporary fad that runs dry- and have found boundless joy in the other (higher) forms of love

Throughout these years of adolescence, my mother helped me through many evenings with my maths, my incapacity to acclimatize to my geography class, my belief in the banality of the Irish language and my sheer laziness when it came to French and in each case I also received grinds or had to work extra hard for each, when my leaving Certificate examinations arrived. What I really needed was a sense of absolute identity, the need to feel the ground beneath my feet, to know much more than the universal sense of recalcitrance and segregation by my peers – and that is the thing this generation thinks that it rebels against the old institutions of previous decades, but indeed they are the fulfilment of a long dormant prophecy and a philosophy that states they are not rebels but the sheer numbers that never think, the adhesive of a mad “normality” that loves pleasure in plethora and but never knows the beautiful truths of life, because they do not think and they do not feel- I myself needed to grow furtively, to find courage, to change my scene and break with these strangers.

So in my final years of school, I caroused a group of young men, but felt no warmth resonating from their egos. My eccentricities, my obsessions and my longings were neither met nor understood. The sight of a den of madmen, encircled, drunk and in company with beautiful girls, stoned and possessed with a high pitch tone of laughter and arrogance in a sea of apathy, this was the setting and the mood which I remember and these were my so-called friends and associated, to whom I felt no understanding nor love from them, but only a selfish gratification of their needs. You may be young, and you may think yourself to be invincible, but you know nothing of life and why live your life if you are a mere slave, a mask and following and taking heed to the pleasure principle of a selfish society. A timeless society, only imagined intellectually, while sought through life, through actualising goals and seeking the fairer side of life and knowledge, this is wisdom for what it is and I don’t proclaim myself to be wise whatsoever, but I speak out about the growing void in the hearts of adolescents today. The gang mentality is all in vogue and is the press these days!

This period which I have described in this chapter can be the most difficult, an utterly harrowing experience for many, and for the Aspie it can be a period of self-doubt and even self-hatred where non most likely should exist. But the school system itself needs to be addressed, revised and confronted. Should Aspies attend a separate school to their NT peers and contemporaries? Perhaps this may be the case indeed, but I will later indulge the reader in my opinion, my slant on the matter and even will offer what meagre advice I have on the delicate issue at hand.

For many years, I just could not walk down the road to my local shops, nor walk into a supermarket, for fear of being laughed at, spotted by people I knew and went to school with. I was prostrated with anxiety, frozen, intrepid and tormented by a notion of physical rivalry with our peers. Each time I was confronted with my peers, I was distraught with grief and it went on and on for years to come.