I remember when my mother called for me from outside. I was seven years old. I remember her voice had a high pitched strain that I had only recently begun to decipher. It was dark out. She had been outside smoking and suddenly had another attack. She was a young mother with three children. She didn’t know what was happening to her.
I ran outside to her and saw her gripping the side of the house; she was pulling herself along toward our front porch as if she were facing the threat of a great fall off of a cliff face. Slowly, shaking, she made it up the stairs and into the house to lie down. This attack was the start of years of doctors visits, seizures, the inability to walk, the start of the slow, steady, devastating decline of my mother.
I spoke with my mother the other day and she talked to me about when she first started hearing “the voices.” She was an orderly at a hospital. “They started out as whispers and laughs.” She became increasingly paranoid. Eventually she would quit her job, one of a long string of various jobs throughout her life. She did everything from cleaning offices and painting restaurant windows with festive designs, to long-haul trucking, office work, and making stuffed animals. She would hang on and do whatever was necessary to care for us. Just hanging on.
We see this pattern repeating. My spouse and I both work in mental health and have noticed this trend in youth: bright, multi-talented, sometimes gifted, almost always suffering from complex trauma, and suddenly having their first psychotic symptoms as teens or in their early twenties. Their brains splitting.
How did I escape this? I had an uncle on my mother’s side who suffered from schizophrenia, who lit himself on fire. I think, also, of queerness in our family. My mother is a lesbian; of my sisters, one identifies as a lesbian and the other as bi-sexual. I identify as queer. My mother was raised Christian. We were Christian-identified until I was 7 when my mother decided we would become pagan. We all “came out” later in life. Was part of our madness attached to the shame and guilt instilled within us by the church regarding our genders, our sexualities?
Our brains were property of the church in some sense, and thus our bodies were not our own. If my body is my own, how my own is it? My brain, my consciousness, mine? How closely related are desire and madness in our society?
It’s as if we were born as the living dead. Born into a system that would have us die, devalued, marked as Other before entering the world. Our brains, our consciousness, our identities dependent upon the perceptions of others. Hailed always as inferior.
“Todos me dicen el negro, llorona Negro pero cariñoso. . .”
I never acknowledged the creeping-in madness. I didn’t even possess enough self-awareness to know it was there. Another gift from my mother. Cliché. I didn’t know myself or what was happening to me. Everything. . . just was. And that’s how I operated for so long. Throughout my childhood until I hit puberty. I was just a product of my environment, most of us are. Especially as a children. Not conscious, per se. Not choosing a self or even aware of a self. Simply surviving. It wasn’t until I had consistency and stability that I was able to fight through the complexities of my traumas. The long journey toward self-discovery first began with healthy food, clean water, access to medical care, community, and education. Then the reclamation of my body and of my mind. The fight for this reclamation began with the birth of my first child.
The human brain, I’ve read, weighs approximately three pounds and is 60 percent fat. The brain. My brain or yours. Grey folds. Up close cross sections in biology. It’s the separation of mind and body. Of mind over matter. It’s who we are and what we are constrained by. It’s differences and likeness. Sexuality and gender. It’s cruelty and pain. Desire and revulsion. The brain is about two percent of our body’s mass as a whole but is responsible for all of its functions. It’s madness. It’s us.
What lies in silence is perhaps discovery or at least something discoverable. Silence, too, is a byproduct of classifying Others, of Othering: outlier, atypical, divergent. We still see this Othering in marginalized groups within society through naming, classifications, diagnoses, hailing; neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+, PoC, physically disabled. Throughout history we’ve seen the mad, the marginalized, the wanderers of liminality, the marabouts as peripheral.
What is external shapes that which is internal.
As in, language, the mind, and therefore the body.
We see higher suicide rates for marginalized folks, higher rates of sickness like diabetes and high blood pressure, depression and anxiety. Black and brown women experience higher rates of obstetric violence. Missing and murdered black and indigenous women rarely make headlines and black men can’t step outside of their homes without the threat of white violence. This is madness. Whiteness is madness is oppression is violence is the theft, mutation, and contortion of desire. Language, then, is a product of the brain, language creating environment, oppressive or liberating, creating categories, us and them.
“Todos me dicen el negro, llorona Negro pero cariñoso. . .”
“She’s crazy.” I can see myself entering stage left. I walk up to the pole, not feeling the pain in my feet or in my back. I see myself swaying to music. I was post-pregnant and I looked it but I couldn’t see it then. My breasts were engorged and my stomach was still soft. I remember getting ready and putting on my drug-store nylons, thrift-store shoes, and dollar-store makeup, and not feeling my body. My brain couldn’t, it was too focused on everyday survival. It was my brain that would help me check out as I was being sexually assaulted and then helped me to forget until I was triggered by seeing my rapist at an art show.
The body and the brain, split: schizo. Lunacy. I can remember speaking with my therapist about how I felt as if I weren’t really in the room for so much of my life. I would instead go about the day as if I were watching myself from a distance. Dissociation. My head cut off. My body numb. I had to name it. I had to know what it was in order to help make it stop.
And so I began the trip back to myself. Like so many before me. What I did know: I was A witch. A heretic. Psychotic. Unbelievable. Liar. Dirty. Harlot. All of these things intersect. Madness, desire, sexuality, and gender.
Who is seen as desiring or worthy of desire or of being desired? What if we thought of desiring as imagining or making? Not our own death but a future in which we can exist beyond our death. Our bodies, ourselves, written into futurity. Decolonizing history.
“Yo soy como el chile verde, llorona Picante pero sabroso. . .”
Something shifted within me the older I got. I can remember remember spending much of my time researching what it meant to be Mexican, to be crazy, to be mixed, to straddle identities, not one but Other. Split. I would listen to stories of how crazy all of the women and femmes in my family were and are. I would scour the bookmobile looking for books with “Latin America” or “Hispanic” in the title. It’s where I learned to be a curandera, a bruja.
I was lucky that Spanish was my first language. I could correct people who mispronounced my name. I would study my last name and my father’s place of birth. I would make altars and celebrate Dia de los Muertos. I would pass this information along to my sisters and my mother and, funnily enough, this would have me labeled as the crazy one in our family. My body had feelings that I still wouldn’t know, that would be clouded by sexual abuse, that were intrusive thoughts. I would run from them for years. I would run from my body and reside in my brain. But it was a beginning. A way to search for something outside of the neurotypical, normative, Eurocentric experience.
Now I understand that my process, my lens, however juvenile and patchworked together, was that of decolonization. A practice I am perfecting to this day. And I know that we’ve always been weeping and searching for the dead to help us while we live.
I understood my ability to make connections. My reverence for nature and recognition of patterns (later diagnosed as OCD) were things that I thought, in pre-colonization, would have been valued and perhaps even treated as a gift. “So much new age ‘culture,’” Dom Chatterjee writes, “steals from POC beliefs and traditions. Herbalism, crystals, meditation, the list goes on and on. Cultural appropriation isolates many people of color, especially in white-dominated locations, from the healing practices that make up the fabric of our and our ancestors’ lives – and our survival.”
I was someone who could commune with the past, the heavens, the subterrane. This comforted me. My spells, my writing, my foods, my medicine. I am protective of these practices. I rely upon them.
And I look now at my mother, and how she was never tethered. She was as free-floating as a jellyfish in outer space. No ties to anything. Stripped. Labeled as hysterical, crazy, insane. Those rituals had been deemed illegal, and were punishable by law just a few generations ago. They were called savage practices. Deemed her mad. Her madness is mine. It is a gift and one that I inevitably will pass on to my children. Madness that is unapologetic in the face of colonialism and profit. Madness that straddles the borders of innovation and empathy. What’s hers is mine. Including historical trauma. I learned to help myself, to ask for it, to talk about it, against all the stigma. I watched her struggle her entire life. With an illness of the brain, of the body, of whiteness, of desire.
Decolonization. I’ve seen so many Queer and PoC lessen the oppressive aspects of mental illness through the process of decolonization. This includes a distancing of the Self from European religion and religion in general. In this way we become excavators of the Self. My daily rituals include dissecting negative self-talk and attempting to locate ways I’ve been infected by the powers that be. But I still cut off my head. And I still watch myself watching myself. My brain. Still colonized. Still aching.
I’m standing in front of the mirror naked. I’m five years old. I see a brown little girl. I think I look just like my father. My hair is straighter and my eyes are blue but I wouldn’t make these discoveries for some years.
“Yo soy como el chile verde, llorona Picante pero sabroso. . .”
It’s during the night that I become hyper aware of my mind, of my thoughts, of my memories. In the morning I’ll tell my partner that my brain kept me awake. And they’ll give me advice about how to fall asleep. I drink tea for my brain, eat food for my brain, read books for my brain. I exercise for my brain and think happy thoughts for my brain.
My brain makes me drink tea, eat food, read books. My brain makes me rub my skin raw, pick my hair. My brain makes me shake when I turn out the lights and my brain picks the worst times to remember shit I just don’t want to remember. My brain tells me I don’t belong here. It tells me to be more positive and to stop being so cynical, tells me to not speak up, to smile, to let them touch my hair. So, I cut off my head. I just watch myself.
I was young, pregnant, poor, and traumatized too. I was living on the border in a small town called Naco. I was in labor and completely stupid. I was in an abusive relationship with a sick man 20 years older. He didn’t want a midwife or a doctor. He used the book, Where There is no Doctor to “care” for me during my pregnancy. The night before I wrote down a dream about my baby in which a drag queen with long sharp nails ran them over my very pregnant belly and said, with an almost comical Russian-esque accent, “I zink zey are wrong.” I gave birth to my son. I was naked in my living room next to our dog. My son was assigned female at birth. Is this crazy?
Which part?
My son is young. He has PTSD. He was diagnosed with autism. He’s trans. But he knows about his brain. He knows about his body. He knows what’s going on every step of the way and I’m there to help him. He knows. Our legacy is named. We cut off its head.
The brain. My brain or yours. Grey folds. Up close cross sections in biology. It’s the separation of mind and body. Of mind over matter. It’s who we are and what we are constrained by. It’s differences and likeness. Sexuality and gender. It’s cruelty and pain. Desire and revulsion. It’s about two percent of our bodies as a whole but is responsible for all of its functions. It’s madness. It’s us.
The other night, exhausted, I woke up to the sound of a dog barking, just one bark, right next to me in bed. I had been up with my toddler’s sleep regression for the past week. I was nearly 5 and half months pregnant. I hallucinated. There was no dog. I should mention that I don’t hallucinate, but it is a fear I have. I laughed and told my co-parent what had just happened. We stayed up talking about the brain, desire, trauma, and healing. I told them about how my last therapy session was strange. I noticed my white therapist looking off into the distance, just past me, while I was talking about my history. My co-parent told me about this new therapy technique they’ve been working with. Revenge Murder Fantasy Therapy.
Cut off other people’s heads. I like it. I need to tell my mom about it. I picture Judith slaying Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi. What I don’t tell my co-parent is that I still talk to my father even though I never knew him. I don’t tell Them that I can still feel them near me sometimes. And that once, I saw a shadow in my newborn’s eyes, of a man standing behind me, and I knew that it was my father. I still feel like my ancestors are with me. Propelling me forward.
“Todos me dicen el negro, llorona Negro pero cariñoso. . .”
And we’re changing the shape of our brains everyday through introspection. My brain makes me drink tea, eat food, read books. My brain makes me rub my skin raw, pick my hair. My brain makes me shake when I turn out the lights and my brain picks the worst times to remember shit. My brain tells me I don’t belong here. It tells me to be more positive, to not speak up, to let them touch my hair. So, I cut off their heads. I just watch myself doing it. And it feels right.
And I know that we’ve always been weeping and searching for the dead to help us. And what if we thought of desiring as imagining instead or as making? Not our own death but a future in which we can exist beyond our death. Our bodies, ourselves, written into futurity. Decolonizing history.
And Foucault, maybe he’s right when he says, “modern man no longer communicates with the madman.” But women and femmes do. Throughout history we are mad, the marabouts, the wanderers of liminality, the marginalized, living peripherally. Armed now with the language to tell our own stories. To take back what is ours, what was stolen.
The brain. My brain or yours. Grey folds. Up close cross sections in biology. It’s the separation of mind and body. Of mind over matter. It’s who we are and what we are constrained by. It’s differences and likeness. Sexuality and gender. It’s cruelty and pain. Desire and revulsion. It’s about two percent of our bodies as a whole but is responsible for all of its functions. It’s madness. It’s us.
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Yola Gómez (she/her-they/them) is a first generation queer Xicanx femme. They are currently a graduate student at Oregon State University Cascades MFA creative writing program. She is currently the co-editor of Red Umbrella Babies; Sex Work and Parenting, an Anthology and has been published in Nat. Brut Magazine with a forthcoming publication in Utterance: A Journal. Yola is an anti-racist activist and sex worker rights activist. Their background is in gender and women’s studies and she currently works in community mental health.
