NERVOUS

A nonbinary Filipina makes sense of a series of diagnoses related to her mental health and chronic pain.

“This is a story I’m not supposed to tell.” So begins Soriano’s formally inventive memoir in essays about her decadeslong relationship with chronic pain, a topic she felt unable to explore because she was socialized to believe that, as an immigrant, she was supposed to “continue a silent lineage—be wordless in pain, resilient and productive, a walking American dream.” The author argues that her physical pain cannot be separated from her personal and ancestral mental health history, including a “deep attachment wound” inflicted by her parents’ emotional neglect and epigenetic trauma derived from her grandparents’ experience of the brutalities of colonization and war. Soriano traces her journey toward a semblance of health, during which she has enacted community-building “modern-day rituals,” like engaging in activism and investing in psychotherapy, and served as a songwriter and singer for Diskarte Namin, a Filipino band dedicated to politically healing music. The author also consciously builds a relationship with the Philippines, where she finds a measure of relief from fear and anxiety. The book comes full circle when she brings her son to the Philippines and they take a ferry ride on the Pasig River, which, after years of being considered “dead,” was, thanks to community efforts, slowly finding new life. Soriano’s elegant prose and imaginative approaches to form propel the text smoothly between disparate topics. At times, the author leaves core issues unresolved. In the chapter about the death of her friend, for example, Soriano spends little time analyzing what must have been a complex grieving process. She also never fully explains any conclusions she might have drawn from the revelation that she probably experienced birth trauma or what it meant to accept that she might never know the truth about her past. Nonetheless, this is clearly a deeply felt narrative.

A cerebral Asian American memoir about the complexity of inherited pain.