NERVOUS

NERVOUS is an exploration of the chronic pain and co-morbid nervous system conditions that the author has lived with for many years, tracing their origins back, through epigenetics, to the collective, inherited trauma experienced by the author's family under colonization in the Philippines.

Using her experience as a trained historian and scientist, Jen offers readers a window into the ways that pain can become both embodied and inherited, and offers new hope for healing on a societal scale. The power of quiet can haunt us over generations, crystallizing in pain that Jen Soriano views as a form of embodied history. In this searing memoir in essays, Soriano, the daughter of a neurosurgeon, journeys to understand the origins of her chronic pain and mental health struggles. By the end, she finds both the source and the delta of what bodies impacted by trauma might need to thrive. In fourteen essays connected by theme and experience, Soriano traverses centuries and continents, weaving together memory and history, sociology and personal stories, neuroscience and public health, into a vivid tapestry of what it takes to transform trauma not just body by body, but through the body politic and ecosystems at large. Beginning with a shocking timeline juxtaposing Soriano's medical history with the history of hysteria and witch hunts, Nervous navigates the human body - centering neurodiverse, disabled, and genderqueer bodies of color - within larger systems that have harmed and silenced Filipinos for generations. Soriano's wide-ranging essays contemplate the Spanish-American War that ushered in United States colonization in the Philippines; the healing power of an inherited legacy of music; a chosen family of activists from the Bay Area to the Philippines; and how the fluidity of our nervous systems can teach us how to shape a trauma-wise future. With Nervous, Soriano boldly invites us along on a watershed journey toward healing, understanding, and communion. Jen Soriano (she/they) is an award-winning Filipinx-American essayist whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Believer, Mother Jones and Waxwing, among other outlets. She is the author of the chapbook Making the Tongue Dry and is the recipient of the 2019 Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Prize from the Center for Women Writers and the 2019 Fugue Prose Prize. Jen was also a finalist in the 2019 Ploughshares Emerging Writers Contest, judged by Leslie Jamison. She has been awarded fellowships from Hugo House, the Vermont Studio Center, and Jack Jones Literary Arts.