Users guide to the chemically castrated half-life make.

Let us begin by stating the obvious: life after chemical castration is not the stuff of Viagra commercials. No grinning man skipping across beaches with his equally radiant wife. No spontaneous tango in the kitchen while uncorking a bottle of red. No, life after ADT (and its charming little side effect, chemical castration) is more akin to a badly lit waiting room in a Soviet-era hospital, functional, necessary, and devoid of aesthetic appeal.

Chemical castration, in the medical sense, is the deliberate obliteration of one’s testosterone by pharmacological means. In the poetic sense, it is the quiet assassination of one’s former self by injection. It is ordered, endorsed, and administered by men and women in white coats, with sympathetic nods and phrases like “you might experience some fatigue”—which is like saying being struck by a freight train might tickle.

Let’s be clear: I chose this. I’m not a victim. I’m a volunteer. Cancer, particularly the prostate-flavored variety, has a way of offering you options that are technically choices in the way that deciding whether you'd prefer the fire or the frying pan is a choice. In my case, hormone suppression was the linchpin in an aggressive treatment strategy. I agreed. I even nodded. But I didn’t fully understand, because no man can, until he’s wandered into this hollowed-out version of himself.

The Day the Music Died
Testosterone, for those of you fortunate enough to still produce it, is more than just the hormone of morning erections and midlife crises. It’s the invisible scaffolding of male identity. It’s confidence, focus, appetite, muscle tone, libido, competitiveness, emotional ballast, and that primal irrationality that makes a man think he should try fixing the boiler himself at 2 a.m. despite zero qualifications. Remove testosterone, and it’s not just the erections that disappear. It’s the urge to do.

After a few weeks on Firmagon, the world dulls like a photograph left in the sun. You don’t care who wins the game. You no longer feel mysteriously compelled to reorganize the garage. You’re not depressed exactly—just profoundly unmoved. The engine idles, but the spark is gone.

Your body changes too, of course. Your testicles shrink, as if they too have decided to vacate this farce. Your chest softens, your muscles atrophy, and a thin layer of belly fat arrives uninvited, like a middle-aged lodger who smokes menthols and wears your clothes. You start to sweat like a minor criminal under questioning, and your bones quietly whisper about their growing brittleness.

Emotionally, you are no longer Teflon. You are a damp sponge of sentiment. Commercials about puppies? Tears. A kind gesture from a stranger? Sobbing. You go from stoic to operatic without warning, weeping in aisles where once you stalked manfully for frozen peas.

The Half-Life Man
Being chemically castrated is not the same as being emasculated, but it’s adjacent. You retain your intellect, your memories, your routines—but you feel like a shadow-version of yourself. A hologram with a calendar. You look in the mirror and see someone you recognize but no longer inhabit.

Sex, as a concept, becomes academic. It’s like reading about fencing in a textbook. Technically interesting, but no longer part of your lived experience. You may love your partner. You may remember desire. But the flame is out, and the gas line has been severed.

Some men find this freeing. No longer driven by lust or aggression, they discover a monkish clarity. Others (most) experience it as a quiet kind of grief—a private extinction of a self that once stood a little taller, laughed a little louder, and checked himself out in the mirror more than he admitted.

Social Side Effects
Try explaining this to people. “I’m on hormone suppression therapy for prostate cancer. Yes, it chemically castrates me. No, I’m not exaggerating. Yes, completely. No, there’s no pill for that.” You will watch their expressions perform acrobatics: horror, sympathy, confusion, and a quick internal recalibration of your manhood. At dinner parties, your presence is now less “alpha male” and more “cautionary tale.”

Men who haven’t gone through it don’t get it. Women often understand better—especially those who’ve been chemically reprogrammed themselves by menopause or breast cancer treatments. But most people simply don’t know what to say, so they nod solemnly and offer something helpful like “Well, at least you’re alive!” which is true, and beside the point.

The Upside (Yes, There Is One)
Here’s the strange twist. Once you adjust to being half-alive hormonally, you begin to see things differently. Your ego deflates, and in the vacuum, other things expand. Your patience. Your attentiveness. Your appreciation for small joys that don’t involve dominance, conquest, or testosterone-fueled urgency. You become quieter. You listen more. You notice the sky. You read more slowly. You become, dare I say it, almost Zen—if Zen monks had hot flashes and breast tenderness.

And you begin to understand: this strange, desexualized, flattened version of yourself is still you. Not the you who built sheds and ogled thighs and set goals. But the you who persists. The essential core. The part that can still love, laugh, and bear witness—even as the biochemical scaffolding collapses.

Final Thoughts from the Underground
Living as a chemically castrated man is not for the faint of heart. But then again, neither is cancer. You endure because you must. You adapt because there is no choice. And you write essays like this one because there is no brochure for what it feels like to be a man who no longer feels like a man, and yet still is, in some strange and possibly more complete way.

So if you see a middle-aged man staring wistfully at a steak he no longer craves, or sobbing in aisle six of the grocery store because someone dropped a grape, know this: he is not broken. He is chemically castrated. And he is still here.