Cellular Memory
What follows is an excerpt from my memoir, Side Effects May Include, the book I’ve been writing (and living) for the past several years.
This particular passage sits near the beginning of the book, before my collapse, and before any diagnosis. Before everything changed. This is part of the story where I’m still holding it all together, right up until the moment I simply couldn’t.
If you’ve ever felt the strange dissonance of functioning while quietly burning, this one’s for you.
Like so many, I had spent this lifetime spastically running away from the childhood wounds that had entrenched as unproductive adult behavioral patterns, trauma that had twisted around my tissue and tendons. My body was bringing to light all the ways I had learned to override my own needs, to push through, to make myself smaller. My relationship with pain and self-care were now confrontations with the tall tales I told about myself: strength as a cover-up for diminished self-worth.
There’s a pattern to breaking. I see it now, looking back, the way ruptures tend to arrive in clusters, each one cracking open what the last one only bruised. First, there was the fracture of my original community. The Hare Krishna cult and that childhood. My mother’s world and then the world’s indifference when we left it. A sense of belonging that was, even if dysfunctional, my gravity. The next break was my divorce. The end of what I had built that was supposed to be the corrective story: the stable home, the family, the version of me that had made something whole out of broken pieces. It fell apart, too. And now I was standing in free fall, no architecture to hold onto. No cult. No marriage. No old self. Just the accumulated weight of what each collapse had left behind, encoded somewhere deep, below language, below memory.
Candace Pert, the neuroscientist and pharmacologist known as the mother of psychoneuroimmunology, showed that emotions like trauma, anger, fear, and grief can become lodged in the cells of the body. Cellular memory. She found that only two percent of neuronal communications are electrical. The brain is more like a biochemical soup rather than a switchboard. Information flows through and across molecules across the entire body; it is not just isolated to the spongy mass cradled in our skulls.
Many memories, Pert has argued, are stored throughout the body as structural changes at the receptor level. The cult had lived in me. The grief of the divorce had lived in me. And the hum of chronic stress and anxiety lived in me. According to Pert, when emotions are suppressed and denied - when we self-silence - the body’s network pathways get blocked, stopping the flow of the vital chemicals that run our biology and our behavior. She described stress-related disease as a kind of information overload, where the mind-body system becomes taxed by unprocessed sensory input, by suppressed trauma, and undigested emotion. It becomes heavy, gets bogged down, and begins working against itself.
I had been overloaded for decades. And I had been functioning beautifully, until I wasn’t.
When I reflect back to the time before I received my COVID-19 booster in December of 2021, I was, as I’ve described, a tinderbox waiting for a spark. I gave a presentation at a company retreat on Catalina Island. It was a ten-minute long presentation, a mini-TED talk where I shared my story about how I got to where I was. My first slide was a picture of my mother on her wedding day in the Hare Krishna cult. My story started with hers, but then I broke off and focused on mine and about what being a second-generation cult survivor meant.
“I’ve had a few names,” I started. My heart raced. I stumbled and wondered why it was so hard to stand in full confidence, owning who I was and how I came to be. “My first name was Suniti. And then it was changed to Esther, which is still my legal name, but everyone calls me Susan, or now, just Su.”
My identity had morphed along with my environments. I am a shape shifter, ever adaptable. An image of my family — my kids and my ex — shone behind me. I explained to the crowd how I still grieved the loss of my home with my recent divorce. Sharing custody, I described, was like feeling my heart wrenched from my body every time I had to say goodbye to my kids. Cavernous loneliness and resentment. I shared a picture of the Irish Setter puppy I got to fill the void my children left in their absence. I got a round of applause when I told the room of fifty people that I was gay, financially devastated, and trying dating apps for the first time in my life.
“But here I am, standing amongst you, and I feel like I’m getting closer to a version of me that feels more authentic. At least I think so.”
None of what I expressed was revolutionary to me, but it was truth that I’d silenced or let exist occasionally, just at surface level. I resisted being defined by others. But why couldn’t I stand and define myself? Be proud of my story, my identity, my pain? That evening, standing before my colleagues, I finally claimed the full weight of my narrative, or at least parts of it. All the nuances and impacts, the identities and memories that shaped me. For the first time, I didn’t narrate over my life. I didn’t make light of it. I tried to keep the self-deprecating, dissociated behavior to a minimum.
The experience surprised me. I didn’t cry or flush while telling my story. I felt strong, steadied by my own voice carrying these truths across the room. There were moments where I felt my tendency to apologize or to be excessive in my gratitude to have an audience at all. I was more than ever inhabiting my truth but also wondering if it was good enough, interesting enough, palatable enough. It was the next morning when I was running along the road edging the shoreline that I felt the first pang in my shoulder.
Whether the COVID booster I received just a week before was cause or correlation, I will never fully know. What I do know is that the grenade was already built. The clip had been loosening for years, through the cult, through the marriage, through the COVID pandemic and then my divorce, through Catalina’s shoreline and that first shoulder pang I noted but kept running anyway. The booster may have simply been the final pull. My body, speaking in the only language I had left it: the language of stopping.