The body politic
In ‘Nervous,’ Jen Soriano traces her fragile nervous system to generational trauma
Jen Soriano’s father, a well-regarded trauma neurosurgeon in Chicago, couldn’t understand the seemingly invisible forces that assailed his only daughter. He was accustomed to sewing up gaping wounds and extracting clots from brains — physical manifestations of pain he could readily identify. Thus, he largely dismissed his daughter’s anguish. “His way of seeing the nervous system allowed him to save lives under pressure; it also obscured my own growing pain from registering as anything that required attention.” In her debut memoir, “Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing,” Soriano must seek answers elsewhere.
After 15 years, she amasses a slew of diagnoses all integrally tied to the nervous system: peripheral neuralgia, mild scoliosis, dystonic neuromuscular spasms, central sensitivity system syndrome, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, and complex post-traumatic stress disorder. The diagnoses provide little comfort, however. They’re simply “new labels for my own failure.”
But they inspire Soriano to delve more deeply into the causes of her suffering, which she soon realizes extend far beyond the boundaries of her own body and traditional Western medicine.
What changes the game is when Soriano
visualizes a new framework, a system of rivers, to conceptualize her agony. “Like waterways within ecosystems, our nervous systems work in close relationship to other systems in our bodies, to other people’s bodies, and to the environments that envelope us all.” This metaphor frees her to reflect more deeply on her childhood, particularly the neglect she experienced from parents who focused primarily on their work and each other
and denied a young Soriano the warmth and attention she needed.
It also allows her to see how her disconnection from her Filipino heritage (despite having two Filipino immigrant parents) deprived her of a culture and community she needed. “I’ve since learned that a strong sense of ethnic identity can improve symptoms of psychological distress in some Asian American communities,” she writes.
Over time, therapies that focus on the mind-body link, including homeopathy, yoga, somatic therapy, EMDR therapy, and acupuncture, seem to take the edge off. “[P]ain was no longer my singular identity,” Soriano writes. “It became something I walked with in some parts of my body rather than the puppet master that controlled all of me.”
“Nervous” goes far beyond tangible treatments though. It is a riveting account of how the violence of war and colonization manifest in a descendant’s nervous system. Soriano traces her pain to her mother’s mother, her Lola. During World War II, the Japanese captured, tortured, and killed Soriano’s grandfather. (His body was never returned to the family.) When Soriano first hears this story as a child, her grandmother’s sorrow from the loss blooms within her, as does the terror she imagines her mother experienced as a toddler during the war. “I have often felt that I carry the current of my grandmother’s survival and grief in my nerves … I now feel that I also carry my mother’s sixth sense of threat detection, as well as my ancestor’s transgenerational commitment to justice.”
One of the most distressing aspects of Soriano’s pain is how isolated it makes her feel from others who don’t know or understand how it impacts her day-to-day life. To help allay this, she relocates to San Francisco and becomes a part of the queer Filipinix community (she identifies as non-binary) where she finds trust, sustenance, and a welcoming place for dissent.
Later, she takes a trip to her parents’ homeland. As a member of the Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines, Soriano works alongside the indigenous communities on the banks of the Chico River who are fighting to keep control of their land. “In my nerves, I feel that the unkempt trees, the undulating rice fields, and the free-flowing river might fully envelop me.” She also joins a band, where the lyrics for the songs they sing become her spiritual anthem.
The synergy of these two activities, activism and performance, coupled with the return to her ancestors’ land, serve as a kind of salve, an emotional scaffolding, that grows Soriano’s capacity to cope, distracts her from her symptoms, and affords an agency she hasn’t known before. “My arms no longer felt burnt to a crisp, breath could enter my lungs without battle, and the rebar-like pain in my hips was filed down to a dull ache.”
Aside from this description, the extent to which Soriano’s newfound integration of self, generational trauma, and justice work alleviates her illnesses is unclear. When a dear friend dies prematurely, and pregnancy aggravates her complex PTSD, we’re left wondering whether her expansive views on chronic illness soften her grief and keep the worst of her symptoms at bay post-partum.
“My body is still in pain, but that pain is no longer contained only in my skin,” Soriano writes. “It is dispersed, borne by the river, and the mountains.” Though revelations like these are undeniably uplifting, they are also a little vague with respect to how they practically play out in the long run.
But perhaps it’s the journey to relief, not the distance one travels to get there, that matters most. A reckoning with how state violence and ancestral trauma inflame the nervous system, and how dissent and resistance can ease it, has the potential to make space for a different kind of life, concludes Soriano — a more holistic existence in the world.
Even if it still hurts.