A (Latina) Cheropohic’s Unraveling: on the Neurobiology of Writing through (painful) truths
What happens when you suspect your voice is fading? We do not talk enough about “burnout” as academics, artists, and activists, yet we are more vulnerable now than ever. I empathize that it can feel embarrassing to confess that the fire within is extinguishing; your cognitive engines are slowing down while your nervous system gets fired up. To “burn out” means to lose your shine; thus, you fade into a version of yourself who feels disconnected and sick. This creative burden can distort your interpretation of the past, which colors your future expectations. The disorientation becomes distressing for your soul because it can render you ill-equipped to identify and discern that feeling drained and unable to cope, coupled with insomnia and a drive to self-medicate, are not part of your creative process. Instead, these are signs of toxic stress, and it can ultimately kill “you.” Since my brain is especially hardwired for negative bias, when it happened to me, I realized it was time to refuel and recalibrate before I crashed.
If chaos is comforting and part of your “process,” sobriety and medications can be terrifying for those of us in the “feelings and thinking” industries. While I wrote 823 dissertation pages at record speed, nevertheless I only remember the suffering I endured in doing so, and the memory still tastes like Monster Energy and other “uppers.” When the adrenaline wore out, I started on Prozac. When the writer’s block kicked in, I started a podcast. When the global COVID pandemic was declared over, and the rest of the world returned to normal, I will never again know, I crashed, and I could no longer recall the embers of the flame called passion. Our adult brains remember most through our senses; this is how we code experiences from our childhood, even the bad ones (Dodaj, Krajina, and Šimić 2017, 620). Yet, the proven signs of complete mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion that limit your creation capacity and potential often go ignored. You can indeed “produce” and even reproduce, but creating remains the most authentic marker of resiliency, subjective well-being, and happiness. Therefore, it is worthy of protection, and the necessary boundaries must be established to cultivate and maintain it (Tan et al. 2021).
I will admit that for me, any mention of fatigue, overstimulation, or brain fog can feel exceptionally demoralizing, given that these are persistent clinical symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis. Despite managing them, I have also been known to create a whole drama around them. I am also adept at masking symptoms whenever necessary with grounding rituals ranging from a cold cloth on my face breathing exercises, and obsessive counting. I struggle to separate real threats from imagined ones because they can feel the same (Samuelson 2011, 349). However, my emotions about my disability have historically gotten the best of me. I concluded that if I wanted to control them, I needed to feel them so all the pain inherited for many generations could stop with me, so the weight of the intergenerational trauma that normalized violence at home and created barriers to care no longer led me down a well (Villanuevo-Blasc, Villanueva-Silvestr, and Vasquez-Martinez 2022).
This is why when I feel any form of embodied limitations coming on, whether a migraine or an intrusive thought, my gut reaction is to tell myself to try harder. I come out of a generation trained to “walk off” most things, hence the soaring rates of Latina mental illness with poor coping skills (Nicolaidis et al. 2011, 1131-3). Yet, trauma catches up in complex ways. While my life growing up was organized around cycles of disorder, poverty, and self-harm, I remained functional and determined to understand myself even more (Gupta and Gupta, 2023). I organized my life around seasons and semesters because they implicate transformation, and I became an adult through therapy and stories.
On Harmonizing Pain: Collective Amplification as Healing
When you endure extreme violence, you become desensitized to your body’s ability to communicate red flags, and you ignore signals of danger. This is a crucial feature of complex PTSD, one I have only recently come to make sense of (Samuelson 2011). I learned from my survival community that when you are in a constant state of “survival mode,” you deplete your gut’s efficiency, compromising your decision-making abilities (this reflex impacts more than the brain-gut connection.) This is really why I forget to eat, why I over-explain, why I get startled easily, and this is also why I also beat myself up when I am triggered (so quickly.) Many adults who have survived child abuse and neglect express similar feelings of potent cognitive dissonance with the world around them (Dodaj, Krajina, and Šimić 2017, 620). I used to feel I should be angry, but now, I understand that I have a right to happiness.
Whether these disconnections and contraindications are a result of an impaired amygdala, a warped attachment style, or limited emotional literacy, feeling on the edge of a nervous breakdown was more than an Almodovar title coming of age (Šimić et al. 2021, 823). It captures what it means to be hyper-aroused and worn out by life. However, I could not outrun my past anymore. My experimental ethnographic methods intentionally aim to confuse the reader by eliciting emotions, evoking ambiguity, and contouring memory (Samuelson 2011). While I take professional advantage of my ease as an outsider looking in, my trauma responses and the language of adverse childhood experiences ensure my ideas are not linear, my memory remains fragmented, and my voice reverberates the generations of pain that passed down through my families and community’s bodies, hearts, and minds (soul).
I broke down inwardly during my recent nine months in San Diego. With the mandated social distancing of COVID policies, either by circumstance or choice, I began to unravel. My sister’s lawyer asked me to submit testimony on her behalf. This meant I had to give coherence to a story previously owned by social workers, cops, and the countless medical professionals who ignored my childhood realities and risks despite their mandates (Dodaj, Krajina, and Šimić 2017, 618). Without metaphor, poetry, and prose, I was asked to tell my story of abuse with clarity and confidence to support my sister’s legal case for leniency within the criminal justice system. I did not want her to be another casualty. Despite our estrangement and the silence that grew us apart in the last years, she sent me four words that will stay with me for life, “Just tell the truth.”
Simultaneously, I continued revising a chapter within a co-edited volume that I worked on with my friend and collaborator Doctor Amarilys Estrella at Rice University, “Harmonizing Latina Visions and Voices: Cultural Explorations of Enternos.” We shared stories of pain, perseverance, and power in this volume, published a few weeks ago. With each revision, I realized that the world I wrote into existence needed to align with the one my sister identified as the source of her demise. Nothing could be more straightforward than my words.
While writing, I realized that many of us (Latinas) grew up with minimal references about what it meant to be Latina. More so, this identity gap left us with a sense of health and self that was inextricable from the legacies of displacement, disconnection, and distance. These cultural deficiencies perpetuated only binaries, stigmas, and pasts that we experienced as incongruent with our lived experiences and dreams (Nicolaidis et al. 2011, 1131-2). Mothers, telenovelas, and popstars inspired and distorted how we learned about ourselves, our communities, and the violent histories that reverberated within our public and private lives. For this reason, when reflecting on this volume, the one word that resonated with us was “harmonizing.” This transitive verb means “to be in harmony” or “bring into consonance or accord.” It is an action and positioning with infinite possibilities and potential to address the constant clashes embedded in our shared existence. After all, sound can penetrate even the strongest of surfaces. I started to reverse engineer a better version of myself that required distance to gain perspective. While on the West Coast, I continued working in Eastern Standard Time, which kept me out of sync with my connections and relationships by three hours. However, it allowed me to close many necessary chapters and write new ones.
How do you amplify a whisper? I learned that our voices need other voices to harmonize with them, so the journey to expression is more relaxed and supportive. Together, we concluded that, within academia and our families alike, our voices can present as self-proclaimed outliers or circumstantial outsiders. Hence, all of the contributions explored the weight of our histories on our present lives as a way to reimagine a liberating future. We articulated the pain, frustration, and rage that drives us to resist, rebel, remember, and reclaim our lives and dreams from all the external and internal forces that put them at risk together. I no longer feel like I can move through this world in silence.
Harmonizing Latina Visions and Voices litho
References
Dodaj, A., M. Krajina, and N. Šimić. 2017. “The Effects of Maltreatment in Childhood on Working Memory Capacity in Adulthood.” European Journal of Psychology 13, no. no.4 (November): 618-632.
Nicolaidis, C., A. Mejia, A. Alvarado, R. Celaya-Alston, H. Galian, and A. Hilde. 2011. “Guardarse las cosas adentro” (keeping things inside): Latina violence survivors’ perceptions of depression.” Journal of General Internal Medicine 26, no. 10 (October): 1131-7.
Samuelson, KW. 2011. “Post-traumatic stress disorder and declarative memory functioning: a review.” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 13 (3): 346-51.
Šimić, G., M. Tkalčić, E. Španić, FE Olucha-Bordonau, and R. Hofp. 2021. “Understanding Emotions: Origins and Roles of the Amygdala.” Biomolecules 11 no.6 (May 31): 823.
Villanuevo-Blasc, VJ, V. Villanueva-Silvestr, and V. Vasquez-Martinez. 2022. “Relationship Between Depression and Risky Alcohol Consumption in Women: the Mediating Role of Coping Styles and Age.” International Journal of Mental Health Addiction, 1-8. 0.1007/s11469-022-00931-w.
