The illusion of the individual self

A shortish essay about microbes and fungus and pregnancy and theoretical physics

In the earliest days of the pandemic, I made a sign-up sheet for the bulletin board in the lobby of my building so we could all take shifts cleaning handrails and disinfecting elevator buttons. I was totally panicked about eighty percent of the time, but cleaning calmed me. I’d go up and down the stairwell with my container of disinfecting wipes, listening to Madeline Miller’s novel Circe on audiobook. I could picture the goddess exiled on her island in the Aegean and imagine that I, too, knew something about what it meant to be cut off from the world. 

Though I felt the shock of isolation, I also understood for the first time—like really understood, in a truly embodied way—how tightly my fate was tied to those around me. The virus had made our fundamental interdependence visible. Keeping myself healthy wasn’t just a matter of self-interest; it was a social obligation. I became kind of obsessed with the idea that, at the microbiological level, we are totally porous. Sure, we all feel like individual organisms making individual choices for our individual lives, but the more I learned about virus transmission, the more I could see that the human body is not the independent, autonomous machine I’d spent my life imagining it to be. I wondered if the whole world stopping to acknowledge this might have profound effects on how we live and relate to each other. 

A few months later, I read Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life on my friend Matti’s recommendation. It’s ostensibly a book about fungus, but as you can probably tell from the title, it’s also about the interdependence of all biological life. Because it turns out you can’t write about fungus without getting into some fascinatingly messy questions like, “Where does one organism end and another begin?” and “What is an individual?” Here’s one of my favorite passages: 

For humans, identifying where one individual stops and another starts is not generally something we think about. It is usually taken for granted—within modern industrial societies, at least—that we start where our bodies begin and stop where our bodies end. Developments in modern medicine, such as organ transplants, worry these distinctions; developments in the microbial sciences shake them at their foundation. We are ecosystems, composed of—and decomposed by—an ecology of microbes, the significance of which is only now coming to light.

(Fun fact about Sheldrake: he grew oyster mushrooms out of a copy of his book and then published an Instagram video of him sauteeing and eating them. This is what we should be using social media for, folks.)

Did you know that the microbes in your body outnumber even your own cells? It’s a little mind bending to try to include the forty trillion (!) other organisms that live inside the human body into your concept of self, but it’s an interesting intellectual exercise. I became fascinated by all the ways we might, as Sheldrake puts it, “worry” the question of where our individual selves begin and end. Then I got pregnant with twins and the question stopped feeling like an intellectual exercise. Instead it felt immediate and pressing and, on occasion, terrifying. 

I wrote my last newsletter right before I went into emergency surgery for twin to twin transfusion syndrome. The simplest way of describing TTTS is to say that, when the two babies share a blood supply through the placenta, there can be an uneven distribution of blood, with one baby getting too much and one getting too little. If left untreated, it’s almost always fatal to both. So far, the procedure—which involved using a laser to interrupt those shared blood vessels so each twin has its own supply of blood—seems to have been successful. For now they seem okay in there.

As you might imagine, I’ve been thinking a lot lately of this question of where I end and the babies begin. And the further question of where each of them begins and ends, when the survival of one can be so tied to the survival of the other. I can feel them now, bumping around in there like two fat trout in too small a pond. All four of their feet are at the bottom of my ribcage and when they kick at my stomach I get a wave of something like motion sickness, even though I am sitting still. Over just a few months, they have changed almost everything about my daily life, my priorities, the way I move through the world, my sense of who I am.

One side effect of the surgery was the rupture of the membrane separating the two amniotic sacs. Now they are in a single sac and are constantly at risk of tangling their umbilical cords, which can essentially interrupt the lifeline to one or both babies. It’s a strange set of circumstances. They are closer together but also a danger to one another. They are always with me but totally out of reach.

Next week, I’ll move into the hospital so they can monitor the three of us twice a day. (Are we three? Only sort of. It is difficult even to find the language to talk about the pregnant self. Lately, I find myself more than ever thinking and talking about my body as though it is something that is fundamentally separate from me—whoever that is.) At twenty-four weeks they will be considered “viable”—theoretically able to survive outside of the uterus. And at that point, we (me and Mark and whole team of NICU and maternal-fetal medicine doctors) begin the ongoing process of weighing the risks of leaving them in vs. the risks of delivering them prematurely. The best case scenario is that we’ll make it to thirty-two weeks. At that point, they’ll schedule a c-section, knowing that the outcomes are likely to be good.

Reading about the risks to mono-amniotic twins is pretty scary. Carrying those risks with me, literally inside me, as I go about my days has been difficult—to be understated about it. It is easier to think of myself as an ecosystem and to accept that my individual identity is at least partly an illusion than it has been to try and integrate the very real possibility of loss into my daily life, into my concept of my body itself. I thought I would spend the summer finishing a book proposal and taking long bike rides to breweries in the suburbs; that person feels entirely out of reach to me now. She is a shadow, a punchline, a dream, an echo.

I try not to think too much about what it might be like to have a “normal” pregnancy. I suspect it is always at least a little bit terrifying. (I just re-read this essay, which I love even more now than I did when I first came across it.) But the fact is that we are still here, better off than we were a month ago.

Back in October, when I was living with a constant, low-level anxiety about the US Presidential election, I distracted myself by listening to Carlo Rovelli’s short audiobook The Order of Time (read by Benedict Cumberbatch: 10/10 recommend). Rovelli is a theoretical physicist who studies the nature of time—and who is super into both Rilke and the Grateful Dead. (It may not be surprising to hear that his interest in the nature of time was at least partly inspired by some youthful acid trips.) While I probably only understood about sixty percent of what I read, I found that taking a cosmic view on the human experience—at least for as long as it took to walk the dog each day—was the perfect escape from the news cycle. 

Like Merlin Sheldrake, Rovelli argues that it doesn’t make all that much sense to think of ourselves as individuals. The world is not made up of individuals and objects, he argues, but of events: 

The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence, not of being but of becoming. We can think of the world as made up of things, of substances, of entities of something that is. Or we can think of it as made up of events, of happenings, of processes, of something that occurs, something that does not last and undergoes continual transformation that is not permanent in time.

A kiss is an event, he says, but so is a stone. From our human perspective, the stone feels durable, permanent. But from a bigger perspective (and a more scientifically accurate one), the stone is a temporary arrangement of atoms. It exists now, to us, as an object, but it didn’t exist in the distant past and it won’t in the distant future. And a human? “Of course it’s not a thing,” Rovelli writes. A human is as temporary as a cloud loitering above a mountain. It is “a complex process in which food, information, light, words, and so on enter and exit. A knot of knots in a network of social relations, in a network of chemical processes, in a network of emotions exchanged with its own kind.”

Sometimes when I feel a tiny (tiny!) foot jab at my stomach I feel something approximating joy. But more often it scares me: someone is in there—two someones—whose journey into this world I cannot control. They are of me and in me and yet I don’t know them beyond the basic and extraordinary physical intimacy we share. In these moments, I find it useful to think of myself as nothing more than an event. An event is defined by its temporality. Change is inherent to its very nature. Remembering this makes it easier, somehow, to accept the present circumstances for what they are. Today I am an event with three heartbeats, which is, if you think about it, a wild and beautiful thing to be. 

Yours,

Mandy