I was a sick but happy kid, very active and curious, always eager to do things and to learn. I did well in school but my parents didn't pressure us academically; I just had a natural interest in almost everything from math problems to science to literature to art.
Then puberty hit.
That was devastating because I'm gay and this was Virginia in the early 1990s and I was treated like a monster for years.
But also...ugh. Adolescence is confusing and challenging for everyone. That is a given. But my mind being taken over by obsessive thoughts about sex, and my penis having a life of its own, was confusing and even dangerous feeling because of the gay thing, but also just plain annoying.
I lost my virginity at 18 and sowed A LOT of wild oats through my mid-20s. I had a lot of adventures, many exciting and fun.
But I still always felt really annoyed by my mind being so constantly distracted by sexual urges, to the point I asked a number of older guys (older to me at the time, so probably up to about 35) if I am stuck with this for life or if the sexual obsessiveness will wear down eventually and I can maintain an interest in other things and follow my curiosities again.
Every single guy said some version of no, the obsessive thoughts don't wane, and why would you want them to? This is what life is about.
No one understood where I was coming from, but my sense of identity always has been rooted in who I was when I was young—just a happy-go-lucky intellectually curious person overall.
It never really even occurred to me until recently that many other people's identities may not similarly trace back to who they remember being when they were young. A lot of people seem not to have much of a sense of identity at all until they are older and 'find themselves,' which isn't really something I relate to.
I'm 45 now and I'm happy to report that while I still think about sex, obviously, it's definitely something I can more or less switch on or off at will, and it never hijacks my whole consciousness ans drives me to seek dick anytime and anywhere. This is what I looked forward to all my adult life. And it has returned me to feeling much more like who I am as a being has more space in my body and my life experience than I had when my body was driven by instinct to scatter seeds.
Feel free to call me crazy, but I'll ask anyway: Do you relate to this at all or have you always felt like you just are who you are throughout your whole life and that no stage of life allows you to be more authentically you? I am curious about others' life experiences. I know, for example, that some people 'peak' in high school, and I wonder if because they enjoy life at that time, they feel that that is when they were most authentically themselves or what. I had a happy childhood and a terrible adolescence but my college years overall were the 'happiest' (and among the horniest) of my adult life and yet that still doesn't make me feel like I was the most content with who I was because I was so driven by urges rather than in control.