self genealogy
recently, i’ve been thinking about the construction of my current self. how the present me came to exist, in addition to their relations to the versions of myself that came before. part of this felt relational to a kind of genealogical destination of selfhood. that i exist as something passed down and spawned from a legacy of former selves, each with their own quirks, traits and struggles. alongside this i’ve recently been confronting questions around fertility and around my own placement in a genealogy. i wonder if i’ve been constantly birthing myself anew, each cycle producing another form of self-hood and representing another confrontation with desire.
the family free of Louis III, Duke of Württemberg (thank you wikipedia)
Deleuze and Guatari posit an idea of schizoid behaviour (splitting) as a confrontation with unfiltered desire, then maybe this desire plays into the cycle. to revert to freudian analysis, the desire for the mother can play into self birth. reconceptualising the parental dynamic internally, we recast ourselves as both parents, the father and (the object of envy) and the mother (the object of desire). so through the envy of my former self - the idealised vision of a past away from current stresses - and the desire for the mother (self-actualisation), a new self is born, one that inherits the traits of the nostalgic self and the current self.
framing this personally and using transness as an easy view through which to understand this, i’m going to introduce four of my former selves Drew, Andrew, Drew 2 and Dee. Drew was the name i mostly went by prior to transition, he was sweet and silly, pretty childish but is an avatar i associate with being fairly joyful and carefree, he came prior to Andrew. Andrew was my full legal name growing up, however, only really became something i went by as a teenager. he was colder and more emotionally closed off, but also confident and professional, driven by the idea that if he worked hard enough and gave as much of himself as possible, he could achieve whatever he set his mind to.
at a later point, i returned to Drew a second time (Drew 2 from here on). they were kind of a middle point between Drew and Andrew, both funny and confident but also lost in their anger at institutional structures and the their newly marginalised status as a trans person. and then you have Dee. Dee was soft and a bit childlike. desperate to fit in and settle within her gender, she was fairly conformist, while being completely burned out from employment rejections and emotional baggage from childhood. obviously these explanations are simplified and it’s hard to narrow a few defining traits that overlap years of change and development but for the purpose of this explanation, these will do.
just a tree
so to start with we can use a freudian understanding of the oedipal relationship to understand the movement from Drew to Andrew. i moved from a childhood self into a the pursuit of adulthood that characterises an ideation of the father. something more professional and driven, born from a desire for adulthood fairly typical of most teenagers. but then the movement from Andrew to Drew 2 is a little different. this follows something closer to a envy for Drew’s childlike playfulness and reintegrated that was aspects of Andrew’s confidence and drive (even if somewhat dampened by their own frustration and anger at systemic problems). but then we move to the movement between Drew 2 to Dee and see a slightly different dynamic. there is an envy for Drew’s (1) childishness that see’s a regression to a self that, while more emotionally available in some ways, was more malleability and conformist and that lost the confidence and fire of Andrew and Drew 2.
birthchart.png
this brings us to Kat (hi!), the current avatar of self (in this simplified analogy). born from a desire for Andrew’s confidence and drive, mixed with some of Dee’s capacity for emotional vulnerability and processing her feelings, she fits firmly in relation to these two selves.
from here i began thinking about to what extent these former selves still live, spiritually but also emotionally. do they die in the process of self birth? are they constructs that are always present and can become emotionally resonant when re-emerging through this dynamic? is there something within this that can explain the hold nostalgia can have on us? and can we artificially manufacture this process with an awareness of it?
i’d don’t have a great deal of confidence in the stability of this theory of self, but it opens up some interesting questions. it makes me wonderful who Andrew would be now without this process. what choices he would have made differently and, if we could communicate, what we would say about his relation to myself as an alternate self, birthed as a product of an idealisation of his identity.
i want to explore this a little more in the future, maybe in something more artistic. maybe looking into the type of work he would have made (if he also followed on to be an artist). or even his politics, had he followed the path laid out by my upbringing, and became an RAF pilot. a career that i have a host of moral issues with and find hard to stomach as an alternative path i almost went down. but thats something to talk about another time, with my only commentary on it being: i grew up on military bases and was sent to a military school, it was hard to avoid the propaganda of it all entirely, however, i made my choice not to and became staunchly pro-disarmament and anti-military.
maybe we are all mothers to the selves that will come after us. nurturing who we will become next and what aspects they will carry forward. maybe through dynamics of self parenthood, we can explore a more compassionate relationship to change and moving forward. one not fostered in admonishment for what we lack but in the breaking of generational patterns and giving the future versions of ourselves more leeway to disengage from the baggage of our pasts.
23.11.2025 - self genealogy