CARLOS CONTRERAS 

CW – dissociation, depression, and death

How to Disintegrate

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1. Notice Something is Wrong

Bus wheels squeal to a stop and you feel the familiar pinprick of that invisible virus of thought: you do not belong in your own skin. It’s May 2018 and you’ve felt this before. Blanketed beneath the wheezing air conditioning and dissociative darkness of movie theaters—artificial tunnel vision to narrow your gaze to the silver screen—your eyes wander as Interstellar loses your attention. You stare at your hands and wonder how these fingers could belong to you. On the ride home afterward, you open and close your fingers as rain droplets gather at the base of the windshield, where the wipers can’t reach them. You imagine the muscles that contract and relax to create this motion, but do not feel them. You cannot feel the center of your palm. You pick at these hands on the bus ride and clench your fingers into fists while walking down the halls of your old elementary school. Just days before graduation, you wear your cap and gown and surround yourself with applause from strangers—most of them half your age. You do not belong here because of the children and teachers you don’t recognize, but also because long ago, concrete poured into your retinas as you were dragged to that dissociative glow. 

2. Look Back

After years of seeing JPEGs, you find the crowds around the Mona Lisa more interesting than the painting itself. A few months have passed since your high school graduation, but it doesn’t feel different than any other summer in your memory. School will begin in the fall, as it always does, and the sun’s radiation makes your skin boil and blister into red bulbs. Whenever this happens, you itch all over but because of how it stretches across the entire body, you don’t have the capacity to feel it all at once. Your neck splatters in pink blotches but by the time you look into the mirror, your reflection is somebody else. The itch becomes a fuzzy sensation that sizzles your skin into static. The discomfort remains but your eyes leave your skull, and your presence evaporates. This sensation doesn’t just come with the summer sun, but it doesn’t take vacations either. You scratch the back of your neck at the Louvre as your mother tugs on your arm with tears in her eyes. It’s the Mona Lisa. You take pictures and try to soak in the acrylics and marble and oils and gouache, but the static in your system makes it feel like you’re not even there. Years later, you’ll wish you could’ve enjoyed the moment while it lasted, but since then, I’ve learned you only cherish moments once they become memories.

3. Reflect

There’s a stranger teasing from the other side of the mirror. Hair grows from their chin and sullies their face, taunting masculinity. Stretch marks thunderbolt down their thighs and underarms. Their dentist asks if their front teeth have always been chipped. One of their eyelids droops lower than the other and twitches. Their eyes carry a hint of green beneath their brown exterior. Their hair curls in sporadic and unkept movements. They have burn marks on their forearm. Their sides and belly protrude over their waistline. Their bare chest doesn’t bother you, but the hair around the nipple does. You realize their chin is a bit lopsided. 

4. Look Further Back

This was the first time—or at least, the first time I can remember. The gray tile is dark and damp from the evening’s rainfall and blood gushes from the corner of your forehead. You’re nine years old and you’re playing tag until your cousin shoves you, leaving a crimson stain on the yellow wall on your way down. The impact echoes throughout your grandmother’s house in Antigua, Guatemala. Before you start crying, you hear the stampede of adults make their way toward you. They speak too quickly in Spanish, using words you haven’t learned yet. Their pupils shrink, appearing afraid to approach you. You hold onto the wound because it’s warm and feels like a massive hand is pinching your skull until you pull your palm away and notice the blood dripping from your fingers. You wail. Your father carries you to your uncle’s car as your mother tries not to faint. Though your consciousness remains, your mind decides to leave the body behind. The whites of your eyes harden into tunnels and your presence in this world recedes. Like a dream. Like hearing tragedies from across the globe, helpless but comfortable in the fact that somebody else is suffering instead. You observe your body move without your command—like a ghost leaving a body—you are conscious of it happening but helpless to prevent it. Dissociation is a defense mechanism after all, enabling the mind to disconnect from the body to avoid feeling.

5. Notice if it Affects Your Everyday Life

You dissolve into the person you want to love. Both of you carry untreated dissociation and it shows in the way you mutate into a fleshy mass—not in how couples talk about their other half, not in how you feel complete around each other, but instead in how you two set aside your own skin to satisfy the other. When the ghost leaves your body, you can see the mess of arms and legs and chests and lips that slam against each other, that detach, that move like marionettes. Your wooden joints contort to embrace them and your brain fuzzes into static. You’re out of your body but not in your head either. If you could see ghosts, maybe the two of you would talk about something else as your bodies search for where the limbs intersect. You’re trying so hard to please each other that you deny your own satisfaction. Some traumas force to host to exit their body while having sex; if the mind doesn’t enjoy it, it might as well let the body take the damage. 

6. Ignore the Symptoms

Do you love your family, do you want to love your family, or do you just want to want to love your family or do you just want to be perceived as a person who loves their family or do you want to feel desire instead of that hollow feeling you carry around—if there is no love nestled within your ribs, there is nothing to protect and if there’s nothing to love there is nothing to grieve once it’s gone like your family members who have died or are bracing for death but you can’t cry and won’t cry even though your grandmother has been in and out of hospitals since the second spring of the pandemic and you’re waiting for that phone call whispering the news of her passing through the static, and you’re waiting to hear wails from across the house, knowing what they mean and your hands sweat if the phone rings whenever you’re beside your mother because it could be the call that breaks the news, and you’re worried to be the one sitting beside her when it happens because you don’t have any words that could comfort her and you’re certain of this because when your uncle died—the same uncle who drove you to the hospital and saved your life because he helped you receive fourteen stitches while you were nine and bleeding—you had no words and wished you could’ve said anything comforting but all you could do was hold her tightly and some may say this is enough, but you cannot stare at a crying mother and claim to do enough as she still weeps, but this is all to ask if you would even cry when your grandmother dies because you already imagine a life without her and already live a life without her and you wonder if you can love somebody while imagining a future without them and wonder if you even want to love somebody who only loves the memory of you instead of who you are, so you ask yourself if you love your family or just want to love your family to just want to want to love your family.

7. Research

Sometime in 2019, people on Twitter try turning dissociation into a personality quirk. You see people hurling the term for the first time, but a creeping familiarity oozes from your screen with every post you come across. You look it up only to confirm your suspicions, learn the symptoms, and decide to seek out therapy. You tell yourself over and over again, but never follow through. 

8. Miss Out

For as long as you’ve had company, you spend time with people who tolerate you—but it doesn’t feel like you’re in the picture. There’s a replicant of you hanging out with your friends, using their inside jokes, using your body. Alien observer, looking at your loved ones through a telescope, you question these relationships because you don’t participate in them.

9. Make Progress

It’s the summer of 2020 and the ceiling fan wobbles as it circles into a blur above your head. You prefer wearing baggy clothing because it feels more comfortable and hides your body from yourself—but the sun dips into the horizon outside your window, seemingly setting fire to the forest on the edge of town. The light flickering through the branches concentrates in your bedroom. Ant under a magnifying glass, you wear shorts and short-sleeved shirts to avoid bursting into hives, keeping your head up so you don’t see your legs. It doesn’t work. The hair on your bony limbs tightens into knots and reminds you of what you were born as. You close the blinds, dim the lights, and distract yourself with a show on Netflix, hoping to travel through time and make it to autumn as soon as you can. Summers in Texas feel as if they occupy half the year, but at least you have an excuse not to step outside. In this Netflix show, there is a moment where a character’s mother discusses the importance of feeling present, asking him if he can feel the inside of his own palm. Like two magnets pressing against each other. Like a nail through the palm. And slowly expands to the index finger, then the entire hand. It feels numb? Like an energy. Then the entire arm from the inside, and then both of them, and then his legs. This gets you out of your mind. Now look. And Listen. If we can learn to perceive ourselves from the inside, our sense of consciousness changes.

10. Question If It Gets Any Better Than This

In the fall of 2021, you commute down President George Bush Turnpike and I-35 for five or six hours every week and think of dying every time you get behind the wheel. On most rides, cars congest to a halt because of a wreck on the side of the road. You’ll never learn if any of these rides result in fatalities—you hope not—but it doesn’t feel any more comforting on smooth, traffic-free drives because it just means the accident hasn’t happened yet. It could happen to you. You turn the steering wheel and think of the statistical inevitability of dying in a wrinkled, aluminum coffin. You try playing music loud enough to drown out these thoughts.

11. Cry For Help

You never cry in front of your parents, but for a moment, you feel as if you might. You hear a crack in your voice as you pull your father aside and ask him how much for a ticket to take you back home. It’s your first time back in Guatemala after you learned what dissociation was, after you learned how much it hurt to grow hair above your lip and beneath your chin, but before you called it dysphoria and dysmorphia. Here, your family looks at you as you were instead of who you are, and the distance between the two is enough to split atoms. Even the family friends you meet for the first time already carry images of you. Stories of your youth and past lives—caricatures of someone you met in a dream. Someone you only remember the distant features of. Yes, you could recognize them in a photograph but not pick them out of a crowd and still, I do not feel as if I inhabited those clothes nor that body. A ghost in boy’s clothing, you walk beside my family to breakfast in Xetulul. You don’t want to call attention from anyone else, but the static is buzzing and ringing your ears and you’re beginning to worry if it’ll ever stop, so you decide you need to leave before finding an answer. You whisper to your father your desperate need to return to a place where somebody recognizes you. He asks you why, but you don’t know how to tell your father that you feel like a stranger in your own skin, like you’re impersonating someone who shares your name, like that same scared child losing their periphery while digging nails into their palms in the disorienting darkness of movie theaters. You don’t know what to say, so you say nothing at all. 

12. Keep Going

You breathe, you wake up, you wash your face, you shower, you exercise, you meditate, you find new hobbies, read new books, watch new movies, you sing along while driving, you feed your dog, watch shows alone or with your family, brainstorm with your brother, stretch your shoulders, your wrists, your neck, you wash your hands, brush your teeth, condition your hair, treat yourself to little gifts, call your friends, cook meals, play video games, listen to music, you draw, paint, take pictures of things you want to remember, you collect records, CDs, cassettes, plushies, manga, books, movies, you try learning new languages, new recipes, new ways to stay healthy in mind and body, you go out with friends if you can, you hug, you love, you write, you keep going, keep going, keep going.

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