I had a convo earlier tonight, and decided I wanted to share this shard of an imperfect understanding with all y’all, in case it inspires someone to look for deeper understanding:

The number of biological stuff science has grouped under the term “Hormones” quite literally rule our lives, and we don’t know it.

The handful of identified hormones in us are ill-understood, but generally accepted to define us, and often fuck our shit up.

It might be said that “Who Am I?” is a question answered by “What Is the Cocktail of My Hormones? That is who I am.” Because that cocktail determines how I feel myself, and how I present myself to others. Maybe, maybe not, dyor.

But do you follow me?

And there are many other ‘hormones’ that are even less understood. Vasopressin is an identified hormone that has been questioned for years because - while generally identified with fluid-management in the body - also seems to cause the severe emotional discomfort we experience in ‘break ups’ and ‘heartbreak’. Vasopressin may be a fundamental chemical compound that has forced humans to want to slash their guts as they fall off a high cliff for centuries on end…not because they lost a life-ending love, but just because they got bad chemicals in them.

None of this is to say that modern pharmacology has any real answers whatsoever! They’ve got some barely useful drugs that can be very useful in the right clinical relationships, yes.

More important to what all this is about:

If you feel, fundamentally, that you’re out-of-sorts, a misfit, an outsider, a loser, not meant for this world, etc. It’s very, very likely its that you have a hormonal imbalance. Your bad chemicals are in control of you. You can’t change this, but you can begin to work against it, and if you do, you’ll become a normal happy wanderer NPC like all the rest of us!

So: every hormone has a ‘balance’, usually provided by nature. For instance, mucuna pruriens (‘velvet bean’) is a naturally abundant source of L-DOPA, which is a biological pre-cursor of Dopamine. Meaning it provides an abundance of resource for your body to generate Dopamine. Dopamine evidently gives ‘meaning’ to life, so people who lack dopamine, or its building-blocks, experience life as having no real meaning. So by identifying the lacking hormone (dopamine) - and the naturally derived ‘balancing agent’ for your ‘imbalance’ - you can find firm footing for a study on how to get your shit together.

tl;dr: Hormones control us, and we don’t spend time learning about the very, very early science of them.