Recently family and coworkers brought to my attention that I have been emotionally comatose for the past three years. This is not a metaphor; my body has stopped producing adequate amounts of the chemicals responsible for making me feel. I'm a 22-year-old man. I used to run 20 miles a week, I skated five days a week, I used to manage a big retail store while running my own transportation business and I went to school full time (before I graduated). I have been living like this for about 2 and a half years, making sure that every night before I went to bed there was not a drop of energy left to wring from my body.


The farther from the world I get, the more ok I have become with being detached from it. There is a version of me at the end of a very dark pool; the world looks far away and blurry. Had no one suggested that I go see a doctor I would have kept on swimming toward the bottom not thinking that anything was seriously wrong.


Average testosterone levels in men sit somewhere between 1200 nanograms per deciliter (DPM) (25 year old N.F.L. linebacker, Tommy Lee, that personal trainer at your gym who wont stop calling about your free consultation), to 250 DPM (A 75-year-old man). My doctor recently informed me that I'm at about 122.


In our society Testosterone is often viewed as the guy at the party who shows up late only wanting to fight you and sleep with the girl you have been flirting with all night, Testosterone seems to make things get ugly. We tend to accredit it with such brilliant innovations as professional wrestling, lifted pick up trucks and war. We often fail to recognize that Testosterone is also in some way responsible for all human life. With out it, it would be impossible to procreate, maintain much of an attention span or feel any kind of excitement.


I am a physically capable person, or at least I'd like to think so. So much so that my body has broken the tap off of my intellectual and emotional keg. Every moment I may have had to reflect on the absence of substance in my life, was filled with pushups or algebra. I read the news compulsively, collecting facts and statistics that may affect other people emotionally. I study them, watch their reactions and try to copy them.


Boring, anxious, compulsive thoughts filled up most of my waking life. For example, I could think about what I am going to eat for lunch from the time stop eating lunch the day before until the time I prepare the lunch for the current day. I could worry about this meal until my life was completely contingent upon its execution; everything about it becomes a cause of worry and hopelessness. Strangely I didn't think about lunch while I was eating and I usually always had the same thing.

Dead, empty and hallow, I sound like a Nine Inch Nails song or a character in a Bret Easton Ellis novel. I could go months without thinking about sex; months without having it. . I was like a goldfish in a 22 year-olds body. I was suffocated with a fear of incompetence at all times. There was a running stream of horrifying negativity plaguing every moment of my life.

About 18 days ago I breached the surface. My doctor prescribed me to hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Now every morning I lather myself in chemicals, walk around my apartment shirtless for a half hour until they dry and then go experience life as the rest of the world does; as I haven't for the past few years.


When in mid resuscitation, the human mouth bites violently at the air, as though the body is in such desperate need for oxygen that the atmosphere itself becomes edible. Picture the gold fish you took home from a fair, before you dropped it in the tank letting it snap back and forth in the foreign air like a baseball card in bicycle spokes. Picture Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction with a stiletto sized syringe dangling out of her chest. Remember the feeling of your first belly flop. The surface of the water sucker punching you, sending you ripping violently through the water. Do you  remember what the air tasted like?


The first thing I noticed was the absence of fear, not any of any specific thing or person, but an overwhelming calm replaced the constant stream of terror.


Now it gets kind of strange, it has become incredibly difficult to motivate myself to do anything that I don't absolutely want to do. Moreover I am realizing that I have spent the majority of these past few years avoiding anything that brought me pleasure because the absence of pleasure was the closest thing to feeling that I was capable of. Think of the relief you felt when you finally ripped that first breath of air into your lungs, you would have never known that pleasure with out the horrifying experience of nearly drowning. My logic was to keep drowning myself until eventually I remembered the feeling of relief at the bottom of the pool (remember my brain was functioning like an mechanical wheelchair in a NASCAR race.).


My drive is returning but it's foreign. I experience my emotions twice, there is the initial feeling; some Hollywood cheese dick doesn't tip me (anger), and then I become aware of my anger and its all becomes strangely funny and reassuring. Like this guy is an asshole but at least I know it. Everyday is now new, oxygen is like ambrosia for the drowning. People ask me what it feels like and all I can tell them is that it feels and it hasn't for years.

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