Where does ‘self’ come from?
I recently listened to This American Life episode #220, Testosterone. Not surprisingly, all the stories are about testosterone: about one man whose testosterone levels dropped to almost nothing and his experiences, an interview with a transgendered man and his experiences being on testosterone, the results of the show staff getting their testosterone levels checked, and one woman talking about her experiences interacting with her fifteen-year-old son.
Since listening, I’ve been thinking about where “self” comes from. My big reluctance to taking antidepressants has always been from a fear of losing something of myself, of not being sure where my emotions are coming from. As the man interviewed in the first section of the This American Life episode notes, we like to think our soul and personality is disconnected from our biological functions. That is, if I lost an arm, I’d still be me. But messing with chemical levels in the body (and, specifically, hormonal levels) can alter us in ways that maybe we don’t like to acknowledge or think about.
As I’ve said before, I certainly don’t think what my reactions are have been different since going on hormones, but how I react – the depth or height of my emotions – has changed. Everything is definitely more raw. To take a ridiculously mundane (and slightly embarrassing) example, I just finished watching the current season of Stargate Atlantis. The episode involved a somewhat ridiculous and convoluted time-travel plot, in which all the characters the audience has come to know and love die over the course of the forty-minute episode. Even though I knew everything would turn out OK – they used a very similar plot device on the last episode of Stargate SG-1, for Pete’s sake – I found myself tearing up as everyone died, one after the other. A year ago I would have laughed at the idea such a thing could make me tear up, and I still feel like kind of an idiot for having done so…
But does that mean something fundamental about myself has changed? I’m not doing anything nearly as extreme as what happened to the This American Life interviewee, and my hormone levels are being kept under supervision by my endocrinologist. But where is the balance between changing one’s self and becoming someone else?
I’ll end tonight’s ruminations with a quote from “She’s Not There” by Jennifer Finney Boylan:
Above all, I wanted my friends and family to know that Jenny was not a stranger, that she was someone they already knew. It was a puzzle, though – if Jenny was so very much like James, didn’t that mean she was not really female? And if she really was female, didn’t that mean that she was someone unknown? That I could be both unambiguously female and, at the same time, the person they had always known seemed impossible. Yet, it was an impossibility that was largely true.
-R
Themocracy
(Hi. I found your blog through a mutual friend.)
Our thoughts and feelings are kind of uncannily similar about antidepressants. When I was younger, before starting transition, I worried that if I took antidepressants I wouldn’t be the same person, that I’d lose some part of identity. Realizing that I was contemplating going on hormones made me decide it was okay to experiment with antidepressants, because obviously hormones have mental effects too, but I found them not very helpful: in retrospect, hormones did far more for depressive tendencies than SSRIs ever did.
Hi Cara! Thanks for stopping by.
I’d agree that hormones have been more helpful than antidepressants in how I feel about myself. That said, I have found a low dose of antidepressants over the last few months helpful. Hopefully I’ll be in a place where I can go off of them, but they don’t hold quite the same fear for me that they used to.