I received my first diagnosis of adult sexuality at the age of 11. Twenty years later, that diagnosis was confirmed. Suddenly, everything in my life made sense, including feeling somehow different from others. When I was diagnosed as a child, I didn’t have the awareness of adult sexuality that I have today.
I don’t remember being told how adult sexuality
influenced my life outside of school; the focus was on how I would manage the “problem” I had with adult sexuality – mainly for the benefit of teachers and others responsible for taking care of me every day. I didn’t think much about my diagnosis in later years, perhaps because (as with most things) I didn’t notice or put the pieces together until it started affecting my life. It wasn’t until 2025, at the age of 31, that I realized that so many of the little quirks I thought were “just me” came from adult sexuality. If it weren’t for my mental health issues at the time, I probably wouldn’t have. I asked for a diagnosis. Getting a new diagnosis as an adult was helpful because it gave me another research topic and a framework to identify adult traits that were, most likely, hidden indicators that I was still struggling with a sexual brain.
I can’t concentrate online or in real life
When I was a kid, the biggest indicator was my obvious lack of concentration. It appeared on the ice when I was training for figure skating, in class, and in my life. My teachers complained. To my mom. “She doesn’t seem to be paying attention.” She’s weaving or staring out the window, and it’s like she’s not even there.
“Yet I got excellent grades and wrote papers that got A’s, and I also liked to write about adult sex. Later, the head of the adult sex coach told my mother, “She has moments of genius, the way she puts it all together.” “I don’t even know if that was a compliment or a burn.”
Growing up, I figured out how to “mask
My inattention But I still had difficulty understanding what people were saying, filling in the blanks. Adult sex: I would sit in class at college, scrolling through Twitter under my desk. My college professors probably thought it was disrespectful, but it was the only way I could get through class and absorb the material. I focused better when doing something else simultaneously than if I forced myself to pay attention to just one thing. Adult sex to everyone else, staring into space or getting naked during adult sex seemed like a lack of attention.
