last night i took testosterone enanthate

There's a really weird difference between saying you're going to do something & watching it become something that has already been done.

for a long time, the idea of "testosterone" was mostly a theoretical concept to me.

numbers on Reddit. blood work screenshots. before & after photos. debates about whether 250mg is low, high, pointless, enough, too little, if it's still considered a TRT dosage, arguments about whether someone is "natural" or not - whatever that even means anymore.

(and who really gives a shit?)

250mg was just another number on a screen to me

until it wasn't.

there was a 1ml syringe with a gigantic needle standing on the table in front of me, and suddenly the whole process became embarrassingly physical.

it wasn't particularly an optimization problem

or a Reddit thread

not something i could X out of

just me, in a room, my friend beside me with a syringe in hand, looking at this small amount of yellow-tinted, oil-based liquid and suddenly realizing how much less abstract the human body becomes when you’re about to force a foreign substance into it.

this seems to be the part that gets lost on the internet

if you read enough about testosterone, for months even, the terminology starts to make it feel almost mundane. testosterone, estrogen, half-life, suppression, blood work. these scientific terms slowly erase the reality that you're talking about your actual endocrine system

it makes it feel like you understand the machine

understanding the machine is not the same as being outside of it

anyway,

i took 250mg of testosterone

and then, to my slight disappointment, nothing happened

there was no epic movie scene

i didn't instantly gain 20 lbs of pure muscle. my jawline didn't shift. i didn't wake up looking like i'd turned the "shoulder width" slider two notches to the right

i was still me,

(albeit with a slightly stiffer arm).

which might have been the strangest thing

you spend so much time preparing for a decision that the decision feels monumental. then you make the decision, and the room is exactly the same

my laptop was still there

my phone was still there

whatever i'd been distracted by ten minutes earlier was still there

except there was this new sentence that was now irrevocably true:

i had taken testosterone

i kept thinking about how easily decisions like this get reduced to numbers

250mg

six weeks

X lbs gained

Y lbs lost

testosterone level before

testosterone level after

but there's a psychological component to it that just can't quite be shoved into a spreadsheet

why did i want to do it?

curiosity?

impatience?

vanity?

the utterly modern malaise of seeing so many genetically gifted individuals on the internet that a completely normal human body starts to feel like an incomplete project? probably some combination of it all

there's also a specific type of confidence you develop from reading too much. the more terminology you collect, the easier it is to convince yourself that knowledge and control are the same

they aren't

knowing what something does isn't the same as knowing what it will specifically do to you

the internet has a way of making individual biology look standardized. plug here. get result there. except humans are not APIs, and there isn't documentation for your specific body

i don't know what i expected to feel that night. maybe just... different

but mostly, i just felt present

present in the knowledge that i had done something i had spent a lot of time contemplating. present in the knowledge that i couldn't press undo. present in the knowledge that i'd wake up tomorrow morning to my same body, my same problems, my same assignments, my same tabs open, and my same tendency to overthink everything

which could be useful, in its own way. because maybe the most important thing about taking testosterone last night had almost nothing to do with the testosterone

it was realizing how fast a thing can go from internet abstraction to real life. one second it's research, the next it's a decision, and the next it's history. the gap between them is a lot shorter than it looks when you're staring at it from behind a screen