I Thought I Needed to Try Harder. Then I Tried Testosterone.

What HRT taught me about fatigue, effort, and the limits of my own neutrality. #TransparentTuesday

Hi friend,

I’m not gonna lie, my thirties haven’t been easy.

Between COVID, health and hormone issues, moving across the country and getting hit with a major depressive episode, tax and business drama, and navigating (then ending) two very difficult partnerships…I feel like I spent most of this decade putting out fires, recovering from putting out fires, and wondering if I would ever be able to get to go back to feeling as good as I did before all the fires.

Compared to my twenties, there’s no doubt that I am so much better equipped and resilient and better at dealing with hardship now. Even in the midst of fatigue and frustration, I’d often find myself feeling grateful to be coming at it from a place of neutrality, instead of making it worse with added layers of meaning, significance, and moral judgement or interpretation.

After all, dealing with depression sucks… but dealing with depression while also feeling shame about what you think your depression means about you? That’s way worse.

Fifteen years of body neutrality work has taught me to view pretty much everything through the lens of moral neutrality, so identifying and stripping away false or unnecessary meaning and interpretation from stuff is second nature to me now.

Nowadays if I get rejected by someone I’m interested in, my houseplants keep dying, I’m unable to stick to the goal I set for myself, or I make a mistake or whatever… I might feel bummed or annoyed, and I’ll probably take stock of the situation and use that information to change strategy or direction.

But I don’t make these kinds of things mean anything bad about who I am, or what I deserve.

This “moral neutrality” has served me incredibly well and seemingly applied itself to nearly every area of my life without much effort as a result of the work that I do. There has, however, been one notable exception to this automatic neutrality, which has haunted my thirties and caused a lot of distress.

Thanks to hormone issues, mental health struggles, and dealing with medications and addiction, I have spent the vast majority of this decade feeling exhausted.

No matter how hard I’ve tried to strip away moral meaning and interpretation from the fact that I slept so much, felt so tired, and had such an alarming low capacity for doing things in the world—including basics like grocery shopping and laundry, let alone things that might help me feel better, like exercise and food prep—I could never quite arrive at “neutrality” around it.

I didn’t exactly blame myself for my fatigue and consciously, at least, I was able to avoid weaponizing it against myself by using it as evidence that I was “lazy” or “unworthy” or whatever.

But what I did instead was to sort of gaslight myself into questioning whether the fatigue itself was actually real, or if I was just making it up.

Part of the reason I found myself questioning this was that the quality and responsiveness of my fatigue would change so dramatically based on where I was in my cycle, as well as other factors like medication changes, what I’d done in the previous days in terms of nutrition and exercise, and whether or not I was fighting with my partner.

On the days when my energy was a little higher and I felt like I could take whatever action, I did so. I might even get a few days in a row where I exercised, socialized, ran errands, handled stuff around the house, and caught up on work.

But inevitably, within a few days I would go back to feeling completely unable to do anything more than the very bare minimum—and I would be left wondering if it was because of hormones, unmet emotional needs, poor habits, or something else entirely. Did I spend too much energy during those days, or did I not spend enough?

This constant web of changing influences made the whole puzzle feel incredibly unpredictable. Some days were “I’m tired but if I go for a walk I’ll feel better,” while others were “I’m tired and if I go for a walk I’ll become so exhausted that the rest of my day will be completely tanked.”

And since I had no real way of finding out which one would be true without taking that risk, I spent a lot of time not doing stuff, and then feeling I should have pushed myself harder to do stuff because maybe it would have made me feel better.

The truth is that it can be extremely difficult to know the difference between “I’m tired and I need to give myself grace and let myself rest,” and “I’m tired because I haven’t been taking care of my needs lately, so I need to push through and take some actions that will help me feel better tomorrow.”

And when you’re chronically low on spoons (learn more about spoon theory here!), trying to figure out which is which can feel like you’re playing an endless game of Russian roulette.

Anyway, for years I wondered if the fatigue was even real, or if it was just that I needed to try harder to overcome inertia.

I alternated between choosing rest and practicing self-compassion, and thinking that it was really just a matter of putting in the work to change my habits and lifestyle, and that if only I could do that, I would probably stop feeling so tired all the time.

Then I started taking testosterone.

I didn’t go into it thinking T would solve every problem in my life. I knew it might be able to help with my fatigue and hypersomnia, I hoped it might help be supportive in terms of mood and mental health, and as a non-binary person I was also curious if I might just like it.

I started at a super low dose, but over time as we got more feedback about how my body reacts to testosterone and increased my dose, I started to get some of my spoons back.

My hypersomnia improved so that I was sleeping less, and had more hours in the day. I could think more clearly and motivation increased, so I got a lot more work done during those hours. I started feeling like I could go for the walk; I could grocery shop and food prep; I could make social plans.

These things still took effort and energy, but the refrain that had been my frequent companion over the years—while laying in bed trying to get myself to get up and get things done—had been ”I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

Thanks to testosterone, that feeling was replaced by the much friendlier “I might,” and sometimes even “I will.”

This experience has really made me revisit the way I questioned and gaslit and judged myself during the years when I couldn’t.

Because now that I can take action again, it’s extremely obvious to me that when I was in my previous state, I really, truly, and literally couldn’t.

Seeing what changed when my testosterone levels changed has really brought home something I probably should have trusted and believed all along, but struggled with:

I was telling the truth about how hard it was.

Does this mean that my fatigue was caused exclusively by low testosterone? No, there are so many interwoven factors and I’ll probably never be able to fully parse them apart. Testosterone levels also rise and fall depending on dosage and type, and I’m still trying to figure out the best fit for me, so that journey is still frustratingly unfinished.

But the unfinished part has taught me something, too. Because as we tinker with dose and type, I’ll observe myself feeling dramatically better at one level, and then dramatically worse again as it drops. And that makes it a lot harder to tell myself that the difference is simply my mindset, attitude, or effort.

Now that I can objectively observe how my hormones impact how much effort things take, I can much more easily validate my own struggles.

What I’ve learned about myself from this journey is that I can trust myself— that I will take action if I can take action, and that if I’m not taking action, it’s because I can’t for some reason.

In the new episode of This Is (Not) About Your Body, I tell the fuller story of my experience with testosterone HRT: why I started and how it’s affected me, what’s considered “normal,” and all the fascinating things this journey has taught me about identity, capacity, gender, sexuality, perimenopause, PMDD, and being non-binary!

I also dive deeper into the stuff I couldn’t cover here, including everything I think women and AFAB folks need to know about this fascinating hormone’s effects, role, testing, and treatment!

So whether you’re curious about my experience, or wondering if testosterone HRT is something you’d want to explore for yourself, you can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on YouTube here:

https://youtu.be/jqTK-SoFB8E

Anyway… if there’s a lesson in all this, it’s that even after fifteen years of practicing body and moral neutrality, I still found a way to attach false meaning to how I felt when it came to chronic fatigue and lack of spoons.

Why? Because neutrality and self-trust are a lifelong practice, and sometimes we need new experiences and information to help us let go of old stories.

Big hug,

Jessi

PS I have some coaching spots opening up for fall, so if you’re looking for guidance or support around body neutrality (or self acceptance and trust of any kind!), just hit reply or apply for coaching with me here.