Puberty is like a second birth. When we first feel lust, we've already matured all our other emotions for about a decade, only to start all over again with an emotion we don't yet know how to balance with the rest. At first it doesn't feel like it's part of our self, because we've already formed our identity based on the other emotions that lust doesn't factor into, instead displacing them.
The newcomer to the party hasn't learned how to play along with the other emotions yet. He's very overbearing, and soon declares that he's the reason the whole party is here. So of course, anyone that's achieved any maturity by that age should be somewhat wary of it. But as for me, I was so focused on freedom that I perceived it as a threat and repressed it altogether, until I came to a point where I still had a sexuality, but it played no part in my emotions, instead becoming much more like hunger: it's easy for the brain to suppress a reaction inside itself, but another to suppress a reaction on the other side of the body, but once it no longer affected my brain, it didn't matter to me.
Only then did I begin to wonder if I'd made the right choice, or if I'd been too quick to judge, but I'd been deceived that I had no choice in the matter and therefore panicked. I was confused, too busy searching for the meaning of life to allow myself to get distracted by a biological imperative that would impose itself as a dogmatic answer without evidence. By the time I'd formed a conception of the meaning of life and how sexuality factors into it along with everything else, the release of gonadotrophin that triggers puberty has already passed, and while it had changed my body, it hadn't thoroughly rewired my brain. Studies show that when asked to try not to think of something, people can reduce the activity in the parts of their brain that does, and I think that's just what happened with me: because it felt so foreign, lust felt like a cyberattack invading my mind, trying to hack it, and I fought it with all I had.
But I'm ready now, my authenticity strengthened to perfection, so I'll begin anew. Rather than being assimilated by sexuality as the rest of the world, I will assimilate it into the whole of my consciousness. Yesterday I began taking a daily dose of 25mg clomiphene, a nontoxic drug that releases gonadotrophin from the pituitary without appearing to cause desensitization of the testes like androgen replacement therapy does. It's the only thing I haven't tried yet: I've tried both increasing and decreasing all the neurotransmitters I know of.
I only know I can't keep living like a child in a man's body any longer. In any other era, people like me who retained their inner child would've become either hermits or monks, and that's why they called each other brothers and pretended they still had a father. Perhaps that's why the only woman I was ever attracted to was Sabine (no, she's not a pedophile, in fact she was almost twice my age at the time), as she'd always retained her inner child, perhaps because her autistic brain processes were so dissociated from each other that the effects of puberty couldn't easily percolate from one through another to her higher brain functions.
I don't know just what puberty is supposed to change about the brain, but it seems to be about more than just lust, about claiming one's place in the world. I didn't feel like doing so before I even knew what my place in the world was supposed to be or why. The first thing I noticed of puberty in those around me wasn't lust, but, at an earlier age, that they became more confident, and I just couldn't understand how they could be when our future seemed more uncertain than ever. To them all the answers seemed clear: study, get a job, get a wife, start a family. Reproduction seemed like the only end to which all else was the means, but it's circular: why live just to sustain life? Such end wasn't enough for me until I knew what it was all about.
And now I know what I live for. I live to increase consciousness, as that's all that everything in our existence is made up of. Sexuality is the more external aspects of that, but nature just didn't give me enough time to develop the internal aspect of spirituality. I needed at least 20 years, not 10. Perhaps, as our species becomes more advanced, we should find ways to delay puberty until a later age — either that, or we need to help children find the meaning of life faster, before they hit puberty.
Neurohormones have a much more far-reaching more effect than neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters just put us in a certain mood while they're released, but neurohormones change the structure of our brain forever, as evidenced in the brain scans of people undergoing a sex change.
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