"strangely enough, everybody believed me"

I contend some of us are aware kids feel this way.

"The sexual energies that had recently surfaced in my own body were, I realized soon enough, not to be argues with. But that did not mean that sexuality itself, and especially as practiced by the adults around me, was to be trusted. As I saw it, the best strategy was to give in to my own sexual needs as vigorously and frequently as I had a mind to, meanwhile pretending to the rest of the world, and the rest of the household especially, that those needs did not exist. If I could not help being prey to sexual desire, and if I was, in fact, pursuing sexual fulfillment as desperately...as the adults around me were chasing after each other out in the open, I could at least have a say in how much of that desire I admitted to having. And I admitted to none.

"Strangely enough, everybody believed me. Of all the various cheerfully naked, patchouli-scented females who drifted through my life in those years, none, as far as I know, ever noticed that the pale, waxy-haired youth hunched over on the sidelines with his face buried in a book about sharks was, in fact, a cauldron--or at least a skillet--of fulminating and deeply confused sexual energy. Time and again, I watched in astonishment as my clumsily feigned lack of interest in all things sexual was accepted at face value.

"Thus when Zaba, a young woman Betty picked up hitchhiking, sought to perform a womb-regression upon me to get to the source of my lack of sensual attachment, she never even paused to consider that I might have been too preoccupied trying to conceal the embarrassing results of her hovering, massaging presence to concentrate on what it had felt like back when I was being born. Likewise...no one ever seemed to question why it was that I sometimes liked to sit down on the floor of the ocean in full scuba gear while a handful of female Atlantophiles were bobbing about above me. As far as everyone else was concerned, I was working on my underwater breathing skills."

--from Paradise Fever: Growing Up in the Shadow of the New Age by Ptolemy Tompkins