Neuroscience Wreck
Content Warning: suicidal ideation, self-harm, ableism, graphic imagery
NOTE: “Neuroscience Wreck” is the opening to an unpublished memoir.
My ESL brain has these moments in which two near homophones get mixed up, like attract and attack. It’s almost an autocorrect wiring in my head. With contend and content, I have to remember that content has two pronunciations and associate more with merrier, despite the cliché. When I have to recall spelling rules, like the difference between dye and die, the one with the I, soy yo, and the thought of I die is my content warning for suicide. This is not just hollow wordplay but rather a caveat.
As a nine-year-old child, I loved rolling down hills, and Gulfgate Mall had a grassy mound outside. My familia wanted to leave the mall, but with anger, I refused to budge. My familia pretended to go without me. After they drove away, I left the mall, and ended up riding in a police car like a criminal back to the mall. I sought my mom, how she always says, I love you.
Today, my tía still calls that day “el día que te chiflaste,” and a severe guilt trip was my compunction. Was the unyielding nature all my fault? The day my familia faked departing without me, I felt isolated and lonely.
In one version of the story, my mom claimed, “We just drove around the parking lot.”
Contrary to that version, my brother confessed, “We went to McDonald’s to get you a drink.” Was he telling the truth? What was the truth? My youngest tío was told to go to the house in case I showed up while I was missing. Today, I see families walk away, and the reluctant kid follows them after a few steps..
Later, I saw myself as a runaway child, and when I was suicidal a few decades later, I read in a psychology book that children must learn the rules before the age of ten to become functional adults. I felt so dysfunctional knowing that I broke the rules at the age of nine, and I partially blamed my mother for deserting me at Gulfgate Mall. My uncontrollable wrath towards her grew because I had become psychotic after being misdiagnosed and was on prescribed narcotics. I was working full time and in a PhD program full time, so I wasn’t sleeping or eating, and being silenced seemed like the worst death of all. I whined via email to my mentor Roberto if I should silence myself, and he assured me that I could be me and express myself freely. I believe he sensed my despair y me mensajeaba para ver si estaba bien. Nonetheless, I was paranoid, and I knew I was making emotional rather than logical decisions. As a consequence, I checked myself in at a behavioral hospital, but I was sent home for being too coherent.
In an effort to help myself, I checked myself in at a different behavioral hospital, but they only accepted me during the day. I asked for medicine, but they told me I would need to be observed for a few days before the doctor could make an evaluation. My nocturnal ritual of trying to figure out what was wrong with me spiked. I couldn’t remember my past, so I started calling mentors from my past. For instance, I had asked why the sociologist Dr. Mary Curry had been hired at University of Houston where I had my first job—in my frantic state, she wasn’t just someone I translated and interpreted for when I was a teen; I started to see her as my new mom. At least, I had a bit of amnesia in the midst of my psychosis, despite that my birth mom’s patience during this time was tremendous.
I have a loving twin brother Carlos, but during the peak of my panic, I was desperate that I had no sister. I started to call amigas who had called me hermana. “I always wanted a sister,” I said as I left Heidi a message.
She responded a few moments later reassuring, “We are sisters.” By then it was too late. I had already decided that no one deserved someone as evil as me. In my illogical mind, I had been guilt-tripping over my lack of normalcy, what I had thought was all my fault. So I went to the kitchen to get a knife and a pizza cutter. I went to the bathtub. My knife was too blunt to do any damage. With the pizza cutter, I tried slicing my wrists, but it, too, was blunt. Looking back, fortunately, I was only able to cut the skin and not my arteries. I gave up and went to bed.
The next morning, I packed some clothes knowing I would be admitted overnight at the behavioral hospital. I saw my mom in the living room and told her, “They’re going to lock me up.” I knew I needed help, but I thought I’d be stuck at what my abuelito called “la casa de los locos.”
“People no longer stay hospitalized; it’s now known that it’s better for patients to return to their homes,” Mom explained. She hugged me and comforted me, “I love you.” Though I was still frightened by my nine-year-old incident, my mother was there for me at all other times. Perhaps she regretted not handling that differently, for she never hesitated to say, I love you.
My brother arrived to take me to the behavioral hospital. Because it was winter, I was wearing long sleeves, so he couldn’t see my wounds. I finally told him that I tried to commit suicide. At the hospital, I uttered, “Bye.” I walked away as my brother’s jaw dropped. I checked myself in, but then I started crying because I hadn’t said, I love you. Luckily my brother hadn’t left yet. “I love you. I’m sorry I ran away,” I sobbed.
My brother knew exactly what I was referring to and said apologetically, “We were just kids.”
Everything was so surreal that even after I was admitted to the hospital, I asked the person next to me if they were a performance artist paid to be there, as if my whole life were staged before my eyes. I was on self-harm watch, so the hospital personnel took my underwire bras away along with my shoelaces. A woman at the pharmacy line asked, “What did they put on your wrists?”
“Neosporin,” I replied and rubbed my wrists together as if it had been perfume. My mom, Carlos, and my friends JD and Jorge, all came to visit me at the hospital. The drugs and therapy at the hospital began working, and my mom brought me wireless bras. I had my brother email Roberto to let him know that I was okay. At one point, I was even handed a razor upon my request so that I could shave my chin to see my visitors.
At age thirty-seven, I was diagnosed as bipolar. It runs on my dad’s side of the family, but because I hardly interact with that side of the family, it didn’t occur to me. The diagnosis was a relief because I finally knew, even if it meant that I belong to a tiny percentage of the U.S. population. In a culture that values nomenclature, an unnamed suffering perplexed me. The answer fed me calmness. Still, my episode prior to the diagnosis was at the lowest stage of my life. Or one of them.
The first time I thought about committing suicide was my senior year in high school, when I felt lost not knowing what would happen after graduation. One of the bathrooms at school on the third floor didn’t have burglar bars over the window. I thought about walking across the bluish gray tiles and opening the window and jumping out. But when I thought about what would happen, I figured that with my luck, I would survive and be paralyzed from the injuries. Why am I having these thoughts? I concluded that my insecurities about my uncertain future were the culprit and shrugged it off.
When I was still a teen, a postal worker told me the state of Missouri is the state of misery. This proved to be true in my case. When I was a prospective student at a couple of universities, I asked, “If I switch majors, will I lose my scholarship?” It was the same question I asked at each school.
“No, we’re interested in keeping our students,” replied the tour guide at a university in St. Louis. This was a place that later embraced my queerness and celebrated the shaving of my head.
To my dismay, I eventually opted not to stay at this university. I wasn’t a morning person, so I would wake up at noon and only have three or four hours of sunlight in the winter. The excessive lack of sunlight and my circadian rhythm depressed me, and I went to a psychiatrist for Zoloft. It didn’t work, so I stopped taking it. Nevertheless, the weather convinced me through self-diagnosis that I had Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). I sought and went on long walks to the park and anywhere else in St. Louis where I had heard that someone was held at gunpoint, but I only found emptiness. After a while, I realized that being suicidal in February’s freezing 3 a.m. weather was dangerous, not only because I couldn’t find other wanderers, but also because I could have been robbed, beaten, or raped. I loathed my cloudy urban landscape, smelly from sulfuric pollution. I needed to flee to the aromatic sun.
In the meantime, I read self-help books on psychology and psychiatry, especially about artists and color psychology. What I read is that light and color preference have an optimum. Just the way a person enjoys a certain range of temperatures, a person has a range of light gradation and colors that they prefer. Preference can be altered by slowly introducing a new range, so for example, adding a small amount of a color that a person dislikes until the person has an acquired taste for it. I did not know that psychiatrically my art had no way of producing lumens or controlling my melanopsin to change my mood. What I accomplished was a way to control my mood psychologically through color. I combined dark colors with bright ones like some 1980s fashion show and convinced myself that I was engaging with cheerful colors. Perhaps I didn’t have Seasonal Affective Disorder after all, but my memory of St. Louis reminds me that I will never live in a place with gray winters again.
As a parallel to el día que me chiflé, I transferred to Austin where there was a grassy hill on campus, and I finally had the freedom to roll down until an ant bit my nipple. That was the end of nature for me—my interaction with nature had been mostly artificial, but it links my memories to el día que me chiflé, or so I thought until there was a place where people can be nude rather than naked, Lake Travis. This was a complete contrast, an adult experience that I could divorce from my childhood memories. With Chev, Alan, and Marifel, we accidentally went to Hippie Hollow, the nudist beach along the lake. The person at the parking lot entrance asked, “Are you over the age of eighteen?” We didn’t know why. I had packed some peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches because we couldn’t afford the fancy meals at the restaurants by the lake, and we got lost looking for a park. We just wanted to see the sunset. Whoa and behold, we saw a couple undressed men. The land is made of stones there, so nudists wear sneakers and shoes, which make the rest of the body naked.
“Are you going to take your clothes off?” one of them asked.
“No.”
“Are you going to take your clothes off next time?” he insisted.
“No.” There was no second time.
Months later, I made a sculptural offering to the Lake Travis fish by netting bowls, adding dirt, and most important, worms, and swimming with the netted bowls. This time, I went where people were clothed. Before Austin received its name, it was called Waterloo. Why do people devastate? Environment, countryside, outdoors, machinery. And all sorts of inexplicable drama, trauma, and tragedies.
All I knew was that my state of mind was not at ease. It was the contrast to singing along to the Caifanes song “Mátenme porque me muero” a decade and half later in a Houston music venue where everyone was singing the depressing, fatal lyrics yet felt so alive. I went to the concert by myself, but I wasn’t alone. So different from my drives alone nowadays, when Blink-182’s song “One More Time” comes on the radio, and the part about possibly dying is conditional and not melismatic. I don’t believe the song is about suicide, but as someone with a history, it feels adjacent. At least in the Caifanes song, the singer admits to using valium, which can cause suicidal ideation. Causation is my difference. Had I been diagnosed accurately as a teen, perhaps my mental breakdown in my late thirties would not have existed. I was practically middle-aged when I had been misdiagnosed, told I had ADHD. My new psychiatrist doesn’t know if I had drug-induced psychosis because of the ADHD meds my former psychiatrist prescribed. Unlike today, when my meds are made for my chemistry.
How do I maintain stamina while being true to my heridas? My mall memory still haunts me to this day, but perhaps I can call that an accident on my part, my mom’s part, my familia’s part. We didn’t mean to stir and steer in the wrong direction. Lo siento, ¿me perdonas? Te perdono.
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About the Author
Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal (she/they) sees, hears, feels, and communicates across mediums and cultures. She’s a deep-watching ekphrastic poet, a photographic eco-essayist, a broad-stroke sketch artist, a sonic improv performer, a sound-sensitive literary translator, and an assistant professor of English. Their bilingualism stems from her 1.5-generation experience being both Mexican and Xicanx. Her debut collection of poetry called Watcha is out now from Deep Vellum Publishing. Their poetry can be found in the Rio Grande Review, Texas Review, The Acentos Review, Defunkt Magazine, and elsewhere. Her published translations of poetry include Enigmas by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Photograms of My Conceptual Heart Absolutely Blind by Minerva Reynosa, Kilimanjaro by Maricela Guerrero, and Postcards in Braille by Sergio Pérez Torres. Stalina is the recipient of the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry and one of the BIPOC Arts Network and Fund 2025 Artist Awards. Their visual poetry—spanning queer erotica, interactive digital art, and video installation—was part of the Antena@Blaffer exhibit at University of Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum. She is currently writing ekphrastic elegies about her interpretative drawings of portraits and a memoir about her photographs of nature—revealing her ability to look backward and within, to write new ways forward.