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…
Author: Melissa "Mel" Maldonado-Salcedo
Anthropologist, Artist, Experimental Ethnographer
www.melthestorydoc.com
I’m not Lazy, I’m Ill
“I am not Lazy; I’m Ill”* Multiple sclerosis can feel like your body is gaslighting you. In high-stress mode, I lift my hands in front of my face to check if they are shaking. In Latino culture, we have a saying, “no me tiemba el pulso.” The literal translation is, “My pulse does…
Sound(e)scaping Complex PTSD: The Self-Saboteur’s Memory
I temporarily lost my hearing a few months ago. Despite the world coming through in whispers, I learned I only see the world clearly through sound. I would not call this ability synesthesia, but it would make sense, like many other clinical terms, when applied to my life. I have tended to get…
Ethnographically Capturing the Autoimmune: Textures and Surplus
Ethnographically Capturing the Autoimmune: Textures and Surplus My New Year resolves to avoid fitting in within academic circles that reductively evaluate and lazily quantify my professional and personal contributions. I am tired of defending: my dissertation, my philosophies, and, ultimately, myself. Mentors and elders have confessed that the purpose of academic hazing is to…
Black and Beautiful, Smoke and Mirrors: The Freed One’s Granddaughter Wears a Crown
Facing down the barrel at the end of my reproductive year, the advent of menopause amplified my embodied differences.
Black and Beautiful, Smoke and Mirrors: The Freed One’s Granddaughter Wears a Crown
Black and Beautiful, Smoke and Mirrors: The Freed One’s Granddaughter Wears a Crown “The Past is never dead. It’s not even past.” -William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun. In the 1960s, researchers came up with “the grandmother hypothesis” to theorize on the evolutionary “purpose” of menopause. NPR ran a story on the benefits of living…
My Anxious Brain Inspires Me
Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo // “A writer….must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument…This is even stronger in the case of the artist that happens, including humiliations. embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art.” -Jorge Luis Borges This story offers a snapshot into my head to provide a humanistic…
Turning Forty and a Corner: a Storyteller’s Data Analysis on an Empathic Life Lived So Far
Cover Image: Mujer by Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo 2021. Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo // OUT OF THIS WORLD Learning that I was an empath changed my life. It wasn’t that this label gave me meaning or purpose; it just simply explained “me.” As an artist, being sensitive is celebrated and somewhat necessary to create. In academia, emotions and feelings should…
Silent Mournings and the Pandemic Blues: Remembering the Dead
Cover Image: Crying Tree by Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo 2020. Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo // I’d play on loop Joe Walsh’s “Life of Illusion” as I watched the news for days. For the first couple of months, I became fixated on the body count numbers. I have generally maintained an apoplectic attitude towards death (theoretically), knowing full well that this…
Emotions as Ethnography: The Story Doctor’s Toolbox
Cover Image: My Aunts by Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo 2021. Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo// I am always “in my feelings.” I say this unapologetically, and knowing that some Latina women are rendered in popular culture as lacking control of their emotions and impulses. The overlap between these representations and my ethnographic life does not escape me. Empathy, “my gut,” memories,…