Inspiring: Stories about telling #MyScienceStory

This week, we present two stories about the people in our lives who inspired us not only to love science, but to find our place and reach our full potential within it. With this episode, we also kick off our end-of-year fundraising campaign! Find out more here. If there’s someone who inspired your science story, you can honor them with a donation to The Story Collider in their name.

Part 1: On her first day as a music therapist, Jude Treder-Wolff realizes the job isn’t what she expected.

Jude Treder-Wolff has been featured on PBS Stories From The Stage, RISK! live show and podcast, Mortified, Generation Women, Mistakes Were Made, Now You’re Talking, The Armando Diaz Experience at The Magnet Theater, StoryFest at The Peoples Improv Theater, The Liar Show, Story Exchange, and many others in the New York City area, Story District in Washington, DC, and Ex Fabula in Milwaukee, WI. She believes in the power of story to build community and is host/creator of (mostly) TRUE THINGS, a game wrapped in a storytelling show, which was the first Long Island-based storytelling show. It was performed monthly at The Performing Arts Studio in Port Jefferson from 2014 until the shutdown – including a teen edition - and expanded to include shows at Industry in Huntington, NY and The Dolphin Bookshop in Port Washington. From 2016-2018 co-facilitated a teen storytelling program for rural teens in southeast Iowa, is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Music Therapist, and improviser.

Part 2: After witnessing tragedy as a child, Mani-Jade Garcia stops speaking.

Mani-Jade Garcia, or MJ (they/them) is a Black-Indigenous-Latinx two-spirit abolitionist, science communicator, artist, and certified holistic yoga teacher exploring the relationship between indigenous healing practices and mental health. Mani-Jade works as an educator for the Racial Trauma Center at Genesee Valley Psychology and as a community-based researcher/evaluator with Social Insights Research). Mani-Jade is currently completing their doctorate in Clinical Psychology. They are co-founder of Black In Mental Health (Twitter/IG: @BlackInMH), Black In Data (Twitter: @BlkInData) and founder/director of Refuge Workgroup (Twitter: @RefugeWorkgroup) a movement dedicated to bringing safety, accountability, and healing to academic and professional spaces. Contact Mani-Jade at manigarcia.com.

Episode Transcript

Part 1: Jude Treder-Wolff

The first day of my first professional job as a music therapist, I feel a little bit like Maria in The Sound of Music in that scene where she's sent out from the convent to go and live with strangers. She's nervous and I'm nervous. She has her guitar and I have my guitar too. And she is singing through the streets of Salzburg surrounded by The Alps on her way to a mansion while I am tripping over actual garbage surrounded by a heavy chain-link fence on my way to a psych unit in a hospital in downtown Newark, New Jersey.

But I feel like Maria because she is going to use music to change those people's lives. And that is what I want to do. Ever since I learned that there was a career path for using music to help people manage illness or heal from trauma or any kind of mental health issue, I wanted to be on that path.

I feel so lucky to be going to work today. First of all, it's 1982 and budgets for anything in the humanities, the fine arts, healthcare, especially mental health have been just cut to the bone. There are no jobs and I managed to get one on a team of creative arts therapists working on the psych unit.

Jude Treder-Wolff shares her story with the Story Collider audience at QED Astoria in Queens, NY in September 2021. Photo by Zhen Qin.

Also, I almost dropped out of my music therapy program because the fine arts part I was a natural for that. That was okay. The music and the fine arts. The psychology and the therapeutic part's a good match. The hard science, neuroanatomy, anatomy and physiology, musculoskeletal anatomy, I struggled. I flailed. I flunked and they were required and I had to take them again, because those terms, those very scientific terms that you have to memorize in order to pass a test were like another language. They are another language. And when I would go to be tested, I would freeze up and it was very difficult for me to actually learn the material.

My last year of the program, you have to take the neuroanatomy of music and neurobiology of music and there's no do-overs. I had to pass. I figured out that if I took those terms, that were so foreign to me, and turned them into lyrics and made those lyrics match some melody in my head, of which I have a million constantly in my head, that I might remember them.

For example, especially the brain, the neuroanatomy, functions of music on the brain were very essential for this degree. So for example one that I came up with was, “Memories of the songs that we create. Vivid social bonding memories. Ain't the hippocampus great.”

Thank you. Thank you.

And the longer and more complex the term, the more dramatic the music would have to be, so that my brain would actually latch onto it. One that still sticks in my head, “Dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and insula, subserve the cognitive and motor functions.”

All of these techniques worked because I remember music and I remember lyrics. So I was able to pass and here I am, going to work.

I arrive on 2 North at St. Michael's Medical Center and my boss Clarice opens this locked door, hands me a ring of keys. It feels like it weighs five pounds, because everything in here is locked, and she takes me on a quick tour of this horseshoe shaped unit that is very smoky and enclosed. There's lots of people milling around, some in hospital gowns, some people just smoking and reading magazines.

She takes me to the activity room, she calls it, and what will be my office, which is a shower that's been converted to have a little a closet in it and a desk where I can put my things. And she says, “Everybody is so excited to meet you.”

I love Clarice. I met her at the interview and I already know she's an amazing boss. She's kind of a combination Whoopi Goldberg and Aretha Franklin with a side of Oprah. There's this earthiness about her and she's strong and everyone looks up to her.

And she says, “Everyone's been telling me who's this Lady Jude? And I say this Lady Jude's going to come and she's going to do arts and crafts with you. And she's going to play bingo with you. Now I see you've got a guitar and she's going to do music with you.”

And I say, “Well, it's fine arts and crafts if I do it. But the team will work out who's doing what but, yes, I'm responsible for the music.”

And she goes, “Ah, about that, since you were hired, there was another round of budget cuts and, as of yesterday, you are the team.”

My heart starts racing and my stomach drops and I know what's happening in my brain. Oh, I know exactly what's happening in my brain. “Time to freak out, it's amygdala. Get out of here, it's amygdala. This isn't good, it's a big deal-a. Time to freak out, it's amygdala.”

Clarice looks at me and she sees that look of terror in my eyes and she says, “No, no, no. It's okay. We've got your back. We'll support you. Just do your best. And everybody's doing a lot with a lot less around here.”

And I'm thinking, “Well, one entire paycheck goes to pay my student loans. There are no other jobs. I have to find a way to make this work or I'm a legal secretary.”

So I go out. I start introducing myself to the patients and I quickly get to know this is the Ellis Island of psychiatric settings. There are people that just got released from a county psychiatric hospital and wound up homeless, that have been chronically mentally ill all their lives. There's Vietnam veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. There's a 21-year-old young girl who survived a suicide attempt. There's all ages and different kinds of conditions in the same enclosed space. They're all going to be in my group together and I'm glad that I have music, because no matter what you've been through in your life, at some point, someone has written a song about it. And if we can't find that song, we will create that song and we will do it together.

So I tell everybody 9:00 tomorrow morning we'll go to the activity room, we're going to do music and then we'll figure out the rest of the day.

So there I am at 9:00 a.m. with my guitar and all of my song sheets and there's just one lady Dorothy. Dorothy who came in, a bipolar person who came in in a manic episode. Very excited about the group. We talked for a few minutes and she says, “I just met you. You're doing a wonderful job, but I think it's just you and me today.”

I go to check this out. So I go and I see these patients still sitting in their rooms and I say, “What's happening? Come on. Let's go to group.”

One person says, “I haven't showered in three days and I don't have any soap.” And another person says, “I haven't washed my hair since I got here, because I don't have any shampoo.” And another person says, “I came in in my street clothes and I don't have any other clothes. They're in the laundry. I don't want to go to group in this hospital gown.”

And I go to Clarice and I say, “How come these people don't have showered and cleaned up?” And she says, “Ugh, the budget. They cut those little hygiene kits. Our patients are the only patients in the hospital that don't get toothpaste and shampoo and you know our patients need them more than anybody. Maybe they don't have family often and…”

So I spend the next day or two rounding up supplies. Clothes at the Salvation Army, clothes at the Goodwill. I use petty cash and go and buy hygiene supplies. And it takes a couple of days but in a few days we are sitting there at 9:00 a.m. And we are sitting, there's about a dozen people there. I got my guitar and we start singing, “Here comes the sun. Here comes the sun.”

And each person says their name and then something that's all right right now. It's a music and mindfulness exercise. So we say it could be that I had a shower and that's all right. Or it could be I had a conversation with a family member, just something that's all right. And that kicks off our morning every day as we begin to create some kind of structure out of the chaos of this place where people come and go very quickly.

People might stay for three weeks. People might stay for three days. There are people that come in overnight. And the thing that's amazing about the music is that they will hear people singing and so they come to check it out. And it becomes a way for new patients to, rather immediately, make friends and reduce their stranger danger.

One day, we're going around and there's Dorothy, “Here comes the sun,” and then there's Davey, “Here comes the sun.” And I look and there's Clarice. She's in the group.

And she says, “You know what’s all right today? What's all right is that they're singing on 2 North. And I hear singing on 2 North and that's all right.”

I love Clarice. I basically spend the mornings doing this and the afternoons making it possible for us to do this by doing all these errands. So about two months into the job, Clarice is waiting for me after group.

She says, “There's a round of budget cuts coming and they're coming for you. I need you to go to the meeting because they don't think that what you do is therapy.”

So now I'm preparing for I don't know what kind of questions, but what I know is that this thing that happens every day and then we do fine arts and crafts and then we do a walk in the park, that this music that we do and the work that we're doing is connecting people. It allows people to find some sense of order and humanity in a place that otherwise is chaotic. I just hope that we can continue or it will be as if I were never here.

I go to the meeting and it's an amazing experience of sitting with here's the chief of psychiatry, the director of nursing, the chief financial officer, Clarice, thank goodness, and some other fancy person with a big title, and a big table. I feel like Alice in Wonderland, very tiny.

And they say, “So what did you do Monday afternoon from 1:00 to 3:00?”

I said, “I went to the Salvation Army with a few patients and we picked up some clothes to have a supply of clothes for people that come in that don't have a change of clothes.”

And they say, “So what did you do Tuesday afternoon from 2:00 to 4:00?”

And I say, “Oh, yeah. I took some patients to St. Thomas More’s church and we got donations of clothing and hygiene supplies.”

And they said, “Well, couldn't we get a volunteer to do this?” They're looking at each other. “We could get a volunteer to do that. We don't we don't need to pay someone to do that. And then, you know, your sing-alongs that you do in the morning, we could get someone to come in and do a sing-along.”

And I think, “My sing-along? You call this my sing-along?”

Inside I am thinking about all those hours of study and I'm enraged. And I think, “But wait a minute. Okay. These are serious people. They believe in science.”

So I pivot inside myself, put my rage to the side and I say, “About the singing that we… that is here in the morning, I'd just like to point out that when you have the diversity of psychiatric conditions in one small space, as we have right now, we could have people with chronic psychiatric disorders to people with acute psychiatric disorders, bipolar, acute depression, post‑traumatic stress disorder, what they all have in common is the hippocampus. The hippocampus which is responsible for learning and memory and mood regulation.

And when people come into this very chaotic place and they feel out of control and highly stressed, it affects the hippocampus and chronic stress shrinks the hippocampus.

But here's what else affects the hippocampus. Music. And when people sing and they respirate and they express themselves, the other thing that the hippocampus is great for is rapid neuroplasticity.

So we are able to, very quickly, create positive social bonds that create positive emotional memories, whereby people are calmer, they're breathing and it is a carefully scaffolded, carefully orchestrated clinical intervention.

And this intervention allows people to be centered and grounded and make better use of their treatment when they see their psychiatrist or the social worker or any of the other clinical professionals that work here on the unit.”

I look over at Clarice and she has to have a poker face, of course, but I can just see a little thought bubble over her head saying, “Here comes the sun, which is…”

And they say, “Thank you,” and I leave and I go to my shower-slash-office and I wait for a phone call to see what's going to happen with my job. No call comes that day. No call comes the next day. And in a few days, nothing happens.

Then Clarice actually asked me to write an article about what we're doing in group for the hospital newsletter. And I realize, okay. For now. And it turns out to be the next two years on 2 North every day from 9:00 to 11:00. Because of science, there was the sound of music.

Part 3: Mani-Jade Garcia

When I was six years old I had a friend who was 12 years old. His name was Ivan. In kid years, the difference between a six-year-old and a 12-year-old is like an eternity. And I had an older brother that was three-and-a-half years older, Caco. He treated me like I was an infant and he as a grown-ass man.

Ivan had a brother that was my older brother's age, David. And Ivan and David, I really loved them. And looking back, that was some of my really happiest childhood memories with those two, Ivan especially because he treated me so well. I felt like he really acted like an older brother and friend to me.

I have these really funny memories. We did all that stuff that kids do. You know how you idolize older kids when you're young? They had water balloons and we'd throw water balloons at cars as they pass. And one time, we threw one at a car but we didn't know the window was rolled down so we hit this person in the— somewhere. They went chasing us and we got away. This is New Mexico, Alamogordo, New Mexico, which I'll tell you a little bit about more in a second.

Mani-Jade Garcia shares their story with the Story Collider audience at Caveat in NYC in September 2021 as part of a show presented in partnership with #BlackinMentalHealth. Photo by Zhen Qin.

Another thing they had was all this cool stuff, including this old, electric race track. So slot car racetrack where you slide the car in. This is the ‘80s. And you move this little lever and the car moves by itself. We didn't have stuff like that. We were poor. So I was glued to that track every time we went.

My younger brother Jorgito, who's three-and-a-half years younger than me, and I used to go to that house frequently. His mother Sofia would babysit.

I love that thing so much that, one time, I didn't want to leave. I had to pee. I didn't want to leave. Pissed myself. Just, it was worth it. I just stayed there and pissed myself and played in joy. I love that thing.

So one night we're over, Luis and I, Luis is what we call my brother Jorgito now, and we're playing with the racetrack but things were different. Ivan was sitting on the couch with his mother Sofia and his father Max.

Now Max had some nervous energy about him. He shook. His skin was really red and he smelled, his skin smelled different. I don't know how to describe it. A little bit of sweetness to his skin. He made me a little nervous.

I knew, I had been told that Alamogordo, New Mexico is the site of the first nuclear bomb test in the world, the Trinity Experiment, and they put soldiers to stand near the blast zone to see what would happen. Max was one of those soldiers and he was very traumatized by the event. It affected his physical appearance and, obviously, his emotional makeup.

So Max was getting really upset. And when Max was upset, we were all nervous.

I'm trying to play with the track. Suddenly, Max erupts and his target is Ivan. He beat Ivan in front of us very severely and we were terrified. Ivan was running and he was chasing him. Ivan finally ran into his room. Max followed.

All I know is that I heard sounds coming out of that room that I'll never be able to forget. Just screaming, “No, please. Please, no. Don't.” Screaming. It seemed to last forever. Kid years or adult years, it just seemed to last forever. We all huddled into the kitchen.

David, Ivan's younger brother was a caretaker-type person so he brought this little house he was making out of popsicle sticks. He's trying to calm us down.

Max finally came back into the kitchen and we're all huddled, sitting there, nervous. I don't remember much except that a few minutes later, I don't know how long, we heard this “pop”.

I grew up in New Mexico. Guns are a part of life in New Mexico, so I knew a gun had been fired, but I didn't know what happened and I was terrified.

Max and Sofia ran into the room and I don't think I've ever heard a woman scream the way I heard Sofia scream. It sounded like a wounded animal had met the devil and got in a fight. It was a terrible sound.

I found out later that that Ivan took a .22 caliber pistol and shot himself in the head and committed suicide that day. He was 12 years old.

I was beyond devastated. My childhood was over. All I have from that night are flashes of like blue and red lights, adults everywhere, a police officer approaching me with a gun in his holster scaring the shit out of me because I was terrified I was going to get killed, somebody was going to shoot me.

He asked me what my name was and all I could muster was, “I don't live here.” I couldn't find Jorgito. I was terrified.

Suddenly, we're out on the lawn. Our parents pick us up. There's a funeral. Adults are falling down in front of me crying. The misery. And I was hit with this realization that children could die. Children could be shot in horrible ways and I didn't know that. I was only six, and I wanted to die.

The feeling that I wanted to die became very present. I grew up as a Jehovah's Witness so we were very religious and I was very religious at the time. So I remember praying, sitting on this hill, staring at this mountain, beautiful sunset in New Mexico, and saying, “I don't want to die, but I do, and I don't know what to do. It feels wrong.”

And I had this moment where it felt like a portal opened up and I climbed in away from that feeling of death. But when I climbed in, what went away was my ability to speak and my memory. So from six to 12, I really don't have a lot of memory of what happened. Apparently, I didn't say anything to anybody hardly at all. I might poke my head out now and then but that feeling of death was there.

So I was speaking Spanish at the time. When I was 12 years old, I was in junior high school and I started becoming more and more interested in coming out of that little safe place. The reason was hormones. Girls. Boobs. Right? And this woman.

My first love is my English teacher. I don't remember her name. I'll just call her Miss English. She had red hair, freckles. She had button shirts all the time. One would come loose occasionally and, oh, God, for a 12-year-old boy it was everything.

The first day of class, she assigned us this assignment. She gave us a notebook and said, “We're going to journal every day for ten minutes before class. You have to write the whole time. Even if you write, ‘I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say,’ I want you to write. And I promise it won't be long enough.”

So I started writing. I hadn't spoken to anyone in such a long time so I started expressing myself. “I like this girl but she thinks I'm ugly.”

Miss English would write back, “She doesn't know what she's talking about.”

So I was like, “Ooh, okay.”

What happened was I started writing and she kept encouraging me. “Keep writing. Keep writing. This is great.” I started opening up.

I was so avoidant of people that I worked in the library at school during lunch. I didn't interact with anyone. I just looked down. And my friend and I, because I had climbed out of my shell more, we were both really miserable. We made a suicide pact. We were going to kill ourselves.

Being the researcher that I am working in the library, I was like, okay, I'm going to go find a book on suicide so we can figure out how to do this. The gun method, I know about that. Not too good.

So I went to the shelves, found a black book with a red-lettered ‘suicide’ on it, and here I am thinking I'm going to find ‘how to’, right? What I found out was how to live. What really convinced me was this. I wanted people to know how much pain I was in and I thought I could really make a point by killing myself. And what the book stated was, “Well, you won't be around to see their reaction,” and that was enough for me.

So I figured out if I'm not going to die, told my friend “suicide's off, we got to figure out how to live and communicate, apparently.”

So I went back to the library and I found a book about shyness. I found another book about self-esteem. The book about shyness had little sample conversations that you can have, like, “How was homework?” “What did you do Friday?” So I wrote those down on a little piece of paper, put them in my right pocket.

I wrote things I liked about myself in my left pocket. “I like this about Mani. I like this about Mani.” And I would approach people, I'd hold one in my left hand, the one about the things I liked about myself, and I'd hold the one with the conversation in my right hand like this and be like, “So, yeah, how was Friday?” I was a Jehovah’s Witness kid too so I was weird in many ways.

But you know what? It started working. And little did I know, I'm a trauma therapist now, that I was using really powerful therapy techniques. I was using imaginal rehearsal and exposure, practicing conversations that might make me nervous. I was using positive affirmations about myself. I was informing myself how to be healthier. And it started working.

One day in class, I'm sitting there. I used to tell jokes in my head, because I didn't talk, and one of the jokes came out of my mouth. Everyone laughed. I looked up. Everyone's making eye contact with me.

Miss English shot up, “Oh, my God, he's talking. Ah, this is great.” Call my parents.

Okay. This is great. So I started getting more comfortable, but I hadn't given an oral presentation in a really long time.

She had an assignment, “What's the worst thing that ever happened to you,” and I thought, “Ivan. What happened with Ivan, that qualifies, so I'm going try.”

I got up and I opened the way I did today. I started opening with funny stories and I thought I was broken. See, I had never cried about Ivan. I had never gone to a therapist. My parents didn't take me to a therapist. They didn't talk to me about it. No one ever spoke about it. I had never felt anything and I thought something was wrong with me. I felt like a stopped-up water hose or something like that, all of that build up.

What happened, the first emotion I felt was overwhelming just laughing my ass off just in front of the class laughing and laughing and people thought it was funny until it wasn't, until people looked at me concerned. I gathered myself and I told them what happened.

The next emotion that overwhelmed me was this overwhelming dread and sadness. I had a complete emotional breakdown in front of the class. Started sobbing. Miss English and some girls came up and comforted me, so that was great. So I was happy about that but I was really happy, although I was horrified, the part of me I was happy that I wasn't broken. I could finally feel something. I could finally cry. I could finally express myself.

So I'm really, really grateful to that part of my life and the things that I did to promote my health. And I have to tell you that preparing for this show, all of these memories I tell you in a linear fashion that connect, this is the first time they actually connect. So I had spent so much of my life, I'm 48 years old now, feeling like a thousand jigsaw puzzle piece with like 900 pieces missing and I don't have the picture, so I don't even know what the fuck it's supposed to look like.

I have all these scattered pieces of myself and memories and I put together a huge chunk just preparing for this story. So I'm really grateful to Story Collider. You know, storytelling is a really powerful way that we heal as indigenous people, and all of us heal that way.

And I want to say a couple things. Miss English, you are my first love. I wish I knew your name. You're the first woman I loved and I still love you. Thank you. Angelina knows. Thank you for what you did. You saved me. You gave me voice.

And I kept writing and I kept speaking and here I am at Story Collider, launching Black In Mental Health Week.

And I want to say to Ivan, thank you for those beautiful childhood memories. Those are some of my only happy childhood memories. I always think of you every day. Thank you.