Anyone know an oxytocin dealer?

Ah, Valentine’s Day.

Instead of whining about loneliness or the capitalist motivation behind this holiday, I’m going to take a close look at the official neuropeptide of Valentine’s Day: OXYTOCIN. Let me make sure to disambiguate early: I’m not talking about Oxycontin, the candy treat enjoyed by children everywhere, or OxiClean, the cleaning product made from the ashes of those who have donated their bodies to “Science.” I’m talking about the neurotransmitter that makes you feel LOVE/ATTACHMENT, the one yr brain squirts out when you’re unmistakably in love, or when your baby thirstily devours milk from your upper torso, or whilst cummin’.

I’ve always considered myself to have something of a problematic oxytocin addiction, even before I knew what it was I was addicted to. There’s something normalizing about the effects of being in a pair bonding relationship, for me, and not necessarily a romantic one. I have always felt more comfortable when there is someone I talk to every day, someone with whom I feel no social stress, some sort of “partner” who feels the same way about me. Sometimes it’s a girlfriend, sometimes it’s a female best friend, sometimes it’s a male best friend. Of course, my preferred source is a romantic partner who can overload me with that specific oxytocin high, and to whom I can offer the same overload. Of course, this is always more or less unpredictable, and sometimes one person in the pair bond stops producing oxytocin as a natural response to the other, leading to certain trauma and tragedy.

(A brief note: I know very little about the specific neurobiological activities being discussed here; it’s something I’m trying to teach myself to understand but it’s very dense and difficult. On this blog I’m just making broad conjectures relative to my own subjective experience. It’s not JUST oxytocin involved in the pair-bonding process; there’s all that vasopressin as well, but I’m pretty sure my simplified version is close, just very low-resolution)

I’ve known for a while now, having compared my own experiences with love and attachment with the experiences of others, that I must have a strange relationship with oxytocin, that perhaps there is something different about my processing or generation of “the love chemical.” About three years ago I went through an obsessive phase of research on oxytocin, having had an event of severe and immediate attachment to a person I had just met, and then enduring traumatic withdrawals from her when we ceased contact. I became convinced that other humans are, in a way, DRUGS. Other people alter the way I operate, at least. I feel like a different person around different people, and that’s what drugs do: they alter the way one operates. I was convinced, however, that some people actually cause chemical changes in the body, chemical changes that can be severe, euphoric, and genuinely consciousness-altering. After a bit of research, I began reading about oxytocin, and found that my conjecture was pretty much spot-on. Oxytocin affects CNS processes related to opiate addiction and cocaine addiction, and one can have withdrawals from it. And I’ve discovered recently that if I go a long period of time without a hefty dose, I start going sort of crazy.

It isn’t particularly a matter of “feeling happy being single,” but a matter of a cessation of feeling normal after long enough. I can hardly operate socially outside of a pair bond, usually, and having gone months without such a bond, I’m starting to feel hopelessly trapped inside my own mind, with no means of escape. There have been many times in my life I’ve been “happy being single,” but during those times I had a best friend and creative partner, the other kind of pair bond. Now that I have neither, I feel somewhat stuck in a spiral, trying to find an anchor point outside of myself, but failing, and growing more frustrated with myself for failing, as though it’s my fault.

This week I was reading an article on PopSci.com about dangerous technology under development, and one such technology was the use of oxytocin for various purposes, some of which are scary, some of which surprised me – apparently oxytocin has come under consideration as a treatment for autism. I could scarcely believe that with all the reading I’ve done on both autism and oxytocin, I had never seen anyone mention that the two were linked, but a quick google search proved that I just hadn’t looked closely. Apparently people on the spectrum have abnormal relationships with oxytocin and vasopressin, and oxytocin levels are typically lower in autistic subjects than they are in the general population.

Discovering this was like finding that one puzzle piece you knew was there on the table but, for all your close searching, you could never find, to the point that you concluded that it must be missing, and the puzzle is no longer worth doing, because you’ll never get the satisfaction of finding that piece. It was just stuck in the couch cushions.

So all of a sudden, my increased normalcy when I have someone I’m pair-bonded to makes more sense than ever. If I have a natural oxytocin deficiency, then it stands to reason that “treating” that deficiency through pair-bonding and subsequent oxytocin generation would increase my sense of normalcy and decrease a lot of my negative autistic behaviors, the same way that intravenous oxytocin improved said behaviors in individuals on the spectrum in this study.

I’m not sure what all of this means, but it sure is bizarre to suddenly find what I considered a crackpot theory about my own functioning to have some basis in scientific reality. I have spent a lot of time mentally self-flagellating because I don’t know how to “be happy on my own,” as I’m constantly told I should be able to do by others. The only time I was able to do this really was as a child, when I was content to exist in the complex universes my mind generated, but something happened when I hit puberty, some schism that made me feel like a whole piece that was also one half of something else, and would feel a void without the other half. I’ve written songs about this idea since I was fourteen, contemplating the concept of an ideal other.

Heh, that reminds me a whole lot of the lovely metaphor put forth in “The Origin of Love” from HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH, so I’ll go ahead and leave you with that video, which I absolutely adore:

I’ll post this week’s mp3 later tonight or tomorrow morning. I still haven’t decided if I’m gonna post something old or try to finish something new that’s close to finished…