James remembers a curious moment of stillness in his childhood when, while out camping with his father among the rolling hills of Fife, he realised that he didn't merely want to learn about nature, he wanted to be in it.

Growing up in the seaside village of Aberdour, he loved learning about birds, trees, fossils and dinosaurs, and regularly persuaded his dad to take him into Edinburgh to visit palaeontology exhibitions. But James's appetite for knowledge didn't extend to school. "I loved learning when I discovered things for myself," he says, "but when people tried teaching me, my brain wouldn't think that way."

At primary school, he was a delicate boy who didn't like cutting his hair, and was teased for being a hippy, even though - in the late 80s - the kids didn't really know what a hippy was. It certainly wasn't enough to explain his phobia. By the time he was 10, James would do anything to avoid school. He still can't quite explain why.

The crisis came when he went on to high school. He tried to fit in, and even cut his hair. But instead of acclimatising, he did the opposite. He got lost and confused, and the bullying became serious. Yet even that, he says, doesn't explain why he stopped going. "It wasn't fear, it was something in the nature of the place."

A meeting with a psychologist came to nothing. James's parents felt he needed a different kind of school. Driving north into the Perthshire highlands, he remembers clutching his pet iguana and coming to a place in the kind of countryside he loved. It was called, simply, the New School, and when he met the other kids there, he thought, "There's something a bit different about you lot."

There were just 40 or so other pupils, but they came from all around the country, and even from abroad. Some had learning difficulties, but this wasn't a school specifically for disabled children. What they had in common was not fitting into mainstream education. James showed one of the teachers the mark on his leg where he had been stabbed with a pencil, and the teacher, Andrew Wilson, showed him a scar on his arm where he'd been stabbed at school himself. For the first time in his life, James felt that he fitted in.

The next three years were among the happiest of his life. The school was designed to give what it then called "fragile" children the confidence to develop in their own way. James didn't like the fragile tag, because it made him sound weird, but he found that, here, it was all right to be different. He could study within the regular curriculum while also pursuing his own interests, such as Buddhism and Celtic paganism. The only thing he regrets is that, as a weekly boarder, he was too cushioned against the "big, bad world".

At 16, James moved back to Aberdour and tried living on his own. He drank a bit, smoked a bit of dope - nothing too serious, but his life was a mess and he got glandular fever. And then he lost all energy. The exhaustion, he was told, was chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME - the notoriously ambiguous condition in which problems of both immune system and personal psychology may be symbiotic.

Desperately thin and run-down, it was while backpacking in Australia that he discovered another place that got him through. Nimbin, in New South Wales, is a subtropical area that was taken over by students and hippies after the Aquarius festival of 1973. James remains sceptical of some aspects of such an "alternative community", but there he discovered an agricultural technique that creates self-sustaining gardening designs, refined from patterns in nature, to bring together crop, pesticide and fertiliser plants in a continuous loop of productivity. It's sometimes called the "lazy man's farming", because once you've set up a system, it requires almost no tending. But, doing it, James worked his way back to health and discovered a philosophy he found meaningful.

Now 26 and back in Fife, he has been asked by his former teacher, Andrew Wilson - who has since become headmaster - to come back and do some gardening at the New School. It was there, and in Nimbin, that James learned how both his phobia and his ME represented a struggle to be at home in the world. He now produces his own music, while he and his girlfriend have submitted a business plan that he hopes will get them settled on a croft, where they can implement permacultural designs and modernise traditional Scottish crofting. "I just want to have a house, a piece of land, and to live," he says, "and then I'll be a happy man."

• This article was amended on 10 April 2014 to remove personal information at the request of the individual concerned.