Julia Monica
“After trauma, you’re never ‘all better,’ just better than you were.”
NAMI: Have you ever had any mental health struggles?
JM: Yes. I think it’s really interesting that you don’t ask what they are and just assume people will go into detail. But absolutely. And the things I struggled mentally with varied depending on where I was at in my life too. When I was a child, I had really bad insomnia. As I was maturing into a young adult, I was in a relationship that was very detrimental to my physical and mental health. I developed CPTSD (Chronic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), a warped amygdala, and severe chronic depression from that. In the past two years I have been in an ongoing battle with manic depressive disorder after a suicide attempt (and no I’m not referring to what is now considered BPD, I am using manic depression quite literally). It’s the first time I’ve had to take medication or rather – that medication was suggested as a treatment. There are a lot of contributing factors that have caused these different mental health struggles most of which can be summed up by my relationship as a woman of color to power – that relationship being the catalyzing force behind their development.
NAMI: How have you healed and grown from your experiences?
JM: I have had to do a lot of identity-meaning-making on my own that could help me name clearly the things that caused my mental health struggles rather than internalizing that there was something inherently wrong with me as an immutable given. Something that factors importantly into my mental health story is that I identify as an Afro-Colombian queer woman who was adopted from Colombia and raised by white folks in America. A lot of people in my life have caused me direct harm: abusive intimate partners, family members, media institutions, peers and mentors. And much of the time, these people were white cisgendered folks so being able to see the disparity in that power dynamic was important for me to identify microaggressions and patterns of harmful behavior that people thought were acceptable to weaponize towards me but were actually forming an internalized sense of self-degradation in my body and mind.
JM: This is an integral part of the healing process as a woman of color who struggles with mental health. It’s not a clean story of going to therapy, taking medication, and suddenly getting better. And through this process of healing, I have grown my ability to resist relapsing into negative cognitions or contemplating destructive behavior. I ground myself with the knowledge that I am loved, capable, smart, needed, and worth more than the end my aggressors had intended for me.
NAMI: How do you protect your mental health? What forms of self-care do you practice? What keeps you balanced?
JM: I’m very wary of the way the word “self-care” has been co-opted and capitalized to be something that is quantifiable, commercial, and #trending. Self-care for me begins with the realization and knowledge that others care for me: that I am worthy of love. In that sense, I protect my mental health by seeking out loving individuals and communities and refusing those who don’t live by a love ethic. Through these social formations I have been able to get back to engaging in activities that help me channel my depression, rage, and self-depreciation. I’ll talk about music-making in a minute, but I also really enjoy being active whether I’m dancing, playing soccer, reading, cooking, working, or just working on maintaining a good work-life-mental balance.
NAMI: You are a musician! What role does music and creativity play in your mental health?
JM: There is no tidy way to start this answer but I think music has always been the way that I have dialogue with my mental health and with the people and events in my life that have affected my mental health. Under my old project EMDR, I wrote a full-length album about trauma from abusive relationships. I think that music touched a lot of people who had gone through similar things and finally felt seen and heard through the music in ways they weren’t hearing in other current or popular music at the time.
JE: But that really served as the catalyst for developing music that felt like a processing of emotions: intimate confessions between lovers at 4am, an awesome feeling of being suspended between earth and sky, waking up to life’s ephemerality and beauty after a brush with suicide, taking a leap of faith and learning to trust someone new after you’ve been hurt. Right, these aren’t really emotions, but I can almost feel the emotion behind them when I try to realize these things in the music I’m making. It makes things about existence palpable that, in an increasing digital-modern-expedient age, seem fictional. The music helps me realize that these things are a very real part of the way that I, as someone who struggles with reality-distortion in my mental health struggles, ground myself in this world.
NAMI: Have you encountered stigma on your mental health journey? How do you combat stigma?
JM: Hahahaha. Absolutely. I’m laughing because I could fill up an entire book with just the verbal stigmatization of my mental health struggles alone but we won’t go there. I think as I continued to survive the injury and harm people’s stigma caused, I was able to tell the difference between when someone was trying to be helpful and when someone didn’t have the empathy or ability to understand what I was dealing with. One instance I can remember clearly was when an ex of mine told me to “just get out and enjoy the fu**ing sunshine” while I was going through the most severe depression of my life having just ended a rigorous degree program, breaking up, and facing uncertainty about my future. I was scared and felt overwhelmed so I started to sink and didn’t leave my bed for two weeks. I can’t remember the last time depression took me like that: no eating, not taking care of myself, just waiting–frozen at the magnitude of grief and whatever was coming next. I didn’t know how to tell them that I physically couldn’t. I think if I could tell them now I’d probably make a joke and say: wow, I’d never thought of that before!
JM: Because as far as advice goes, it’s ridiculous in hindsight. If healing was that easy, don’t you think more people with mental health struggles would take it? It just speaks to this larger stigma people have about people who struggle with mental health that they are somehow romanticizing their issues by willingly not taking action to make them better–that they prefer to be stuck in their trauma and bad cycles. That’s at best a naive myth and at worst a dangerous judgment call that might leave someone with mental illness alone, feeling hopeless, and out of options.
JM: Knowing I didn’t need anyone’s blessing to feel the things I was going through regarding my mental health struggle allowed me to combat their stigma by telling them they weren’t understanding or being helpful. It takes a lot of courage to do that though, so I encourage people to be patient with themselves if they’re having a hard time advocating for themselves in that way.
NAMI: Why did you decide to share your story? What keeps you hopeful?
JM: One–to make voices and bodies visible. It’s no accident that in a White Supremacist society, larger social discussions around mental health feature mostly white subjects telling stories about their mental health struggle or journey. It does the good work of giving those people nuance in their character, identity and lived experience. We see this reflected in the intricate character development of white actors in movies versus black actors whose characters experience more surface-level character arcs in comparison. I have even seen this locally in Rochester.
JM: And I have observed from my position as a woman of color that the same nuance and multi-dimensionality is not granted or allotted to the stories of people of color who struggle with mental health. I hope by sharing my story people can understand that mental health/illness does not discriminate. Anyone can be affected. And the more people, organizations and systems working to provide mental health services in our local and global communities realize this, the more hopeful I feel about humanity retaining its ability to use empathy to heal itself.
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