Questions About My Illness

People often talk about love, relationships, and the intensity of their feelings. I suppose I can say that I have a partner myself. The problem is that I have had hormonal complications since early adolescence, and I have spent practically my entire life on medication to manage them.

Something I have noticed is that people seem to experience these things very intensely. Sometimes, I envy that.

I have had sex with my only boyfriend, and yet I have never experienced anything other than pain. I barely feel anything when someone touches me. At some point, I simply came to the conclusion that perhaps this is not something meant for me. My boyfriend has known this from the beginning, or at least for many years now, and he has never complained about it. We have had more arguments over stupid things than over my condition.

But as time goes by, I seem to be losing more of my sense of touch. On top of that, I will probably have to take hormone-regulating medication for the rest of my life. Generally speaking, I don't feel as though I have many options. I don't think I have ever really experienced these things in the way other people describe them.

I often read about people masturbating or watching pornography, and my first thought is that my main concern is simply not putting my hand on a hot stove. I mean that quite literally as a comparison: sometimes I feel as though my nerves have been burned. I experience pain for several months out of the year, and there have also been occasions when my reproductive organs have developed complications.

I think this has also made me a rather boring person.

I have always considered myself boring, but I sometimes find it easier to connect with people when conversations involve feelings or subjects that eventually lead back to relationships. And that's where things become rather awkward. Whether I'm talking about my partner, my friends, or even people I've met while moving between different places, I don't seem to feel much of anything.

I don't feel sadness, either. There is only one person I remember genuinely caring about as a friend many years ago. After that, something in me seemed to switch off.

I sometimes think about another person with the same condition as mine. She started receiving treatment, and at least she was able to experience pleasure. Perhaps newer medication could make a difference for me, too.

Her experience with medication was rather complicated. She started with one type of medication, eventually ran out of it, and was offered the same brand I take. It affected her very badly, apparently causing severe ovarian pain. She spent the entire week crying, her academic year fell apart (although she had already been struggling academically), and eventually she gave up and returned to the island.

I should probably clarify that I do hold her responsible for some of what happened. She was irresponsible in several respects, and I don't think it would be fair to attribute every consequence to her medication.

However, the comment that those pills can cause depression stayed with me.

The difficult part is that I have practically been taking them my entire life. Trying to determine whether they affect my mood is complicated when I have never really had the opportunity to experience life without them.

I cannot simply stop taking medication to find out what I would feel like otherwise. My treatment exists for a reason: without it, I risk complications involving organ enlargement, something that actually happened to my friend.

So I am left with a rather uncomfortable question: how much of my emotional detachment is part of my condition, how much might be related to the medication, and how much is simply the way I have learned to experience the world?

I don't know.

What I do know is that these experiences have made me feel increasingly distant from other people. And, honestly, I don't think I know how to fix that.

My boyfriend did choose to stay with me throughout all these years. He is someone who experiences emotions very intensely, or at least someone who spends a considerable amount of time expressing affection and speaking to me in an affectionate way.

I cannot say that I dislike my boyfriend. Quite the opposite, I appreciate having him in my life. But sometimes I find myself wondering whether I would actually feel differently with anyone else. I don't think I would. It isn't necessarily about him, or even about our relationship. I sometimes feel as though I simply wouldn't be particularly interested in anyone, regardless of who they were.

And that brings me to something I have been thinking about for years: what a boring existence.

I don't necessarily mean that my life lacks activities, people, or things to do. I mean that the sensory experience of everyday life feels rather poor. There is so much that other people seem to experience physically and emotionally, and I feel as though I am only getting a fraction of it.

Sometimes I wonder whether I have become accustomed to such a limited experience that I no longer know what I am missing. And perhaps that is what bothers me most. It isn't just that I don't experience certain things; it's that I have spent so long living this way that I don't even know what a different experience would feel like.