some things you can only write about when it's dark.

'i struggle and emerge'

it’s 5:01am at the start of this writing; the sun hasn’t risen yet and i’ve been up for a few hours after falling asleep on the floor again, trying to abate another panic about whether or not i can feel my heart beating, whether or not i am going to spontaneously die. the heater is whirring in this perpetually frigid, high-ceilinged room. for the first time i have my salt lamp on the glass table beside me. april has been a month of repetitions, returnings, shape-shiftings, ruptures. Release.

at the end of april, 2018 i made the call to see a psychiatrist instead of jumping the bridge. i can still see myself now, crying at first on the edge of my bed, i think— or maybe that was another night— either way, then hunched over the laptop screen in the dark, on zocdoc. a few days or day later i had my verdict, the bipolar II and anxiety disorder diagnosis i had been running from for most of my life. my dad’s diagnosis, his mother’s diagnosis. the confirmation that Something Was Wrong. i found the scanned documents i sent to the doctor today, opened one and realized i didn’t quite want to read them again, yet. there’s a poem i wrote right before the big event i was doing on the intersections of art and mental illness that month, that i may or may not post on substack at some point— i find it in my emails, subject line ‘(no subject)’ and read it to remind myself, from time to time. what i have come back from, moved on from, moved with, and through. it begins with a rilke quote: ‘lord, we are more wretched than the animals/ who do their deaths once and for all,/ for we are never finished with our not dying.’

that same week, i think— i got another ‘test result,’ this time completely unexpected and in my bloodwork, that sent me spiralling further into shame. i felt like someone who was just picking up diseases and infections and diagnoses, especially after the previous autumn i had barely scraped through— boundary incursions erupting all over in the implosion with my then-partner struggling wildly with addiction. at some point during this month, the candida infection on my left middle fingernail also began to emerge. it has never left, and further shame-inducingly, spread to most of my nail, separating it from the nailbed and returning even when i cut my nail down to halfway towards the cuticle— and it’s now been six years. even when i try to paint over it with nail polish, to hide it— when the polish comes off, the usually (now) white coloring of my nail turns greenish black.

what we keep in the dark. what we need to write about, while it’s dark.

i chose to Live, then. i chose to leave the bottle of latuda i was prescribed at my parents’ house and, the next morning, start my first-ever prayer novena to saint jude, my nana’s saint, the appropriately known ‘patron saint of impossible causes.’ i prayed for one more chance. i prayed to ‘manage my bipolar without medication.’ i prayed for four weeks to save my life.

at pentecost, those weeks later, it was like i was living a different life. but/and not because anything was solved/resolved/Over— because it had just Begun, in a completely New way.

***

in april 2021 i am released by the parkland (the land, and not the admin) from the job i held for 5 years, the longest job i ever held. i was the programs director for an internationally renowned and locally deeply beloved outdoor art museum, waterfront park, and community space. i managed and executed large-scale outdoor free public cultural events— and literally, thousands of other things— at an overflowingly abundant clip that would’ve killed anyone else (and as my successors/replacements have found— was Too Much of a job for one person).

it will be 3 years this month since i received that message. funnily enough— 2018, that utterly change-making 2018— was also the year, at the end of which, when i was almost fired (for real, that time)— that i heard the voice of what i didn’t yet know was the parkland itself. it told me— we’re not done with you yet. and you’ll know when we are.

what happens to you when you are without a map? when the survival strategies you invented to push and pull through, suddenly fail you? when the well of resolve you always seemed to have, Somewhere— even when you had next-to-nothing— seemed fully Gone?

for the first time, i made a choice for myself. it involved vaccinations and the state of the world at that time, trying to bust its way out of covid. i don’t feel like getting into this space, here— but/and will say that anyone who did not opt for it, had a particularly unique, levelling, othering, and abjectly damaging experience— and there is no way to fully understand it, Embodied, unless you chose that same thing, too. there was finally something that broke in me, after that last conversation with my boss— and as i walked outside to sit and cry with the flowers our late groundskeeper had planted, i knew it was something that Could Not Mend.

the message came, just as the voices said it would. you will always be a daughter of this land. you’ve learned all you can here. you chose yourself. It Is Enough. It Is Enough. It Is Enough.

i cried from the Deep-Deep place, that day— and i felt the land grieving with me.

but/and how do you describe this to anyone at all, around you— especially your boss or coworkers or young adoring staff? it was Collapsing. and the message, as they said, was Unequivocal, Unmistakable. no loss in translation of the clarity.

but i tried to hold on.

i tried to hold on for one more year. to tie everything up maturely and in a responsible way. help choose my successor. impart my knowledge. say a long goodbye.

my spirit wasn’t having it— and my body made that Crystal Clear.

a little over a month later, i tried to work my first two events of the season. the first i tried to call out of, was met with what i perceived palpably as guilt/resistance/much accumulated exhaustion; showed up for a little while and had to go home. i rested, i worked myself up, for the next one— but still woke up feeling ill and crying. i heard in my mind, perched on the toilet seat— why do you think we are going to give you the energy to do something we don’t want you to do? we told you already, It Is Enough. i went anyway. i couldn’t feel Anything, for the first time. not the land, not my staff, not the people. we were helping the lead artist facilitate a huge sound bath ceremony, and the only time i felt any shred of embodiment was standing right next to the blazing fire in the fire pit.

even after that, i could barely let go. i still remember the last conversation, on zoom, with my boss and our HR — (the latter who didn’t exist in our small/tight-knit non-profit during my full-on crisis days and could have been so life-giving [and pressure-relieving, on both sides!!] for an employee who was sequestered in their dealings with only that boss and his personal perspectives and decision-making capabilities/limitations) … i was sitting on a folding chair in the then-empty room of what is now my kitchen— still crying and asking, what are we going to do about summer solstice? — the festival that was one of our biggest events, and my favorite of every year. it was my boss who gave the hail mary, the act of mercy. my boss who told me to just put the pencil down and walk away. that they would triage, and figure it out— as the programs director violently— and seemingly suddenly— crumbled apart just as the big live season, the triumphant Return after covid, was beginning.

at this time— my brother also suddenly announced he was moving to california with his girlfriend. i chose to give up my safe haven studio apartment and move back into the apartment i am still living in, now, in my childhood home (which is also my father’s childhood home, and the only place my parents have ever lived), because i wouldn’t be able to afford the rent and had no backup plan, savings, or ability to shift into another job. it was just— the best decision to make, at the time. i had also, over a span of months, fallen in love with a poet/storyteller who lived in manchester, UK and was in the throes of debating how we would ever inhabit the same space, ‘in real life,’ given the covid restrictions and my never having flown alone (plus terror of flying).

***

on what ended up being my last day at my job, i had previously scheduled a tattoo appointment for the idiosyncratic ankle wings of hermes— the psychopomp, the trickster, the god of thresholds and guide of souls— that i had been wanting since my late teens/early twenties. three hours and one 10 to 15 minute break later— with 3 airplanes audibly flying over as i laid on the table, inking one ankle after another— i had unknowingly initiated myself into what would become The Rest Of My Life.

***

it is april, again.

last april, i returned to my childhood home after another fantastic collapse. it was wrenching, because i wanted it so badly— to move my life Forward. to escape my family home, the entrapment, and all its energetic toxicity. to be able to live closer to the wild in my upstate dream-town along the hudson river that had courted me since late august. there was the chronic searing pain of physical injury that sealed the deal, and this time— i knew enough to Call It. i knew enough to say I Let This Go, I Just Fucking Give Up.

last year, upon retrospect, seems like a micro version of some of the macro themes of my decision-making in my adult life. there is obviously So Much More Life betwixt and between what i am about to relate, but i am highlighting the broad motifs relevant here … i physically injured myself from carrying too much, including energetically. i had to seek safety in a place that was safe enough— my ex-fiancé’s place, because i couldn’t come back home. there wasn’t a way, for me, not to fall back into a dynamic in such close quarters with a relationship that never became fully neutral— then i reactivated the original pattern by needing more fire/nervous system spikes and reconnected with my other longterm back-and-forth ex. then proceeded to fall into premature attachment (tears, i love you’s, and all) in record-timing with a handsome young artist visiting from the west coast who appeared on my second day of work at a popular local cafe. then swept into what i didn’t yet realize was a person-with-disordered-eating’s living nightmare— working for the first time in the food service industry at said busy cafe with lax boundaries in which free and accessible food is everywhere. then i fell back into ‘fun beach days’ with my ex-fiancé. then into doing mythic-energetic work remotely and in the woods with another ex who had become a friend for many years post-breakup— not surprisingly, reigniting the eros of our attraction in the spirit of perceived progress and healthier evolution. which then led Again back to the other longterm back-and-forth ex. and energetic work with all 3 of them, to Help Them Unstick— funnily, not funnily— exactly the work for my Own Self that keeps falling deep into the unseen/shadows. after i finally Realized the inappropriateness of this, not only for my own emotional health but as a space-holder/inner realms worker in general, and resolved to End This Pattern Once and For All by observing a vigil for the first place it began in my personal young adult life, my abortion and relationship betrayal … i received that txt from my college ex-boyfriend that his sister was in the hospital and not going to make it. i did the Most Fucking Heroic, Heart-Rending, and Humbling thing i have ever done or tried to do, and was called to walk her through her death threshold. and then i became entangled in grief and reopening old wounds and fervently reigniting my romance (and magical, romantic futuring!) with this person i had fallen in love with when i was 18, coincidentally right at the time of my abortion— and this stopped and started and stopped again, in a flurry of such energetic distortion and confusion, as of a few weeks ago.

my body is tired. my heart is tired. my guts, since that point— have been trying to tell me something (that is a whole other post for a whole other time; i know enough now to not try to write about something while i am still moving through it) …

***

why am i still awake? why is it now 5:45am, space heater still whirring, cup of golden milk with turkey tail mushrooms drunk, salt lamp still steady beside me. if i peer out under the blinds i can see it still hasn’t really started to get light yet.

the things we can only write about, in the dark.

tonight in this between-worlds time— the time i either love to Expand into and relish, My Beloved Night— or Recoil into child-bodied age-old fears, into vigilant Holding, and Silence, and anxious Listening, Aloneness … i somewhat trepidatiously listened to an astrology podcast my gal lyssa sent me, based on the journey i’ve been undergoing/revisiting these past few weeks, on a topic called ‘healing poop problems.’ you see it everywhere— your inability to take a shit is your inability to let go. inability to let go. let go. let go. it’s words, though— it’s concept. and somehow it has felt to me, further shame-making. and leads to the electrifying guilt and entrapment that makes you— Me— want to FORCE IT OUT of yourself. to do something drastic. to jump at the next opening. to bust at the seams with the uniquely devouring sensations of Hopelessness that have led me to all manner of destructive and avoidant behaviors— including trance-eating/food binge-ing, overworking, ex-relating, and becoming preoccupied with solving other people’s problems.

(i thought i said i wasn’t going to write about this while i was still in it—?)

the point is (well, One of them, anyway— let’s be real)— that nearly 1 year to the days of returning home. six years to the days of choosing life. three years to the days of collapsing into one of the Greatest and Most Viscerally Painful releases i have ever experienced. there is a Profound Generativity here. there is a sense of Everything Happening The Way It Needed To. even the dizzying string of sentences filled with complexifying ex-relations i semi-cringingly typed out a few paragraphs ago.

i’m thirty-seven years old, and i am still hearing my father yelling somewhere in this house. i am still witnessing my mother unable to— and having genuinely no interest in— leaving. i am still witnessing my father making the same threats of divorce he has made since i was a child— the intergenerational emotional violence of which i’ve fucking written about enough. What Is This Here— this pattern of stuckness, of staying, of magical thinking, of threats, of ungrounded futures, of escape through food or men or overwork or fantasy?

my time living outside this house— and paying rent— coincided with my time at my last full-time job. i left home when i was twenty-five but it was to live with the first longterm back-and-forth ex, and then with the man who would become my fiancé. i was thirty years old, with my first room of my own. my first rent being paid. i had shared a bedroom with my brother until my mid/late twenties. my dad is still living in the house he grew up in. before abruptly moving to california, my brother had only ever lived in this house. my mother came here in her late teens, from a few blocks away in the same neighborhood, to Escape— the abject violence and chaos of her own childhood. this place where the energy of the abject violence and neglect of my father’s childhood undoubtedly still lives.

the map i was given reads:

— depend on a man for your safety and shelter, even if it means eroding your soul and autonomy to do so. develop increasingly compulsive clandestine tendencies to compensate for and/or avoid your unfulfillment the only ways you know how, and direct that nervous energy into codependently micro-managing everyone else’s lives with fear and control;

and/or,

— completely and utterly overwork yourself for your overly high-stress job in order to resource yourself (and your family) until you literally almost die, and everyone blames your ‘broken brain’ for your collapse/breakdown instead of the full context of the situation, including your very legitimate trauma/C-PTSD; constantly threaten your escape but make no moves, for years, for all manner of reasons.

in both situations there is toxicity. in both situations there is stuckness, poor and dangerous boundaries. in both situations there is a long-ingrained pattern of giving yourself away, even if it is for devotion, or responsibility, or love.

importantly i must realize that both situations are influenced so directly, and so suffocatingly, inextricably heavily, not only by their own trauma/family trauma, but the generational and societal expectations/models of the time, unspecific to my parents …

either way and Every way, irregardless of what forces are acting in, through, and upon it— in both situations there is Not Enough Imagination— or Faith— To Dream A Way Out.

***

so, hermes. this is where i sit, once more— at your threshold.

knowing it is time To Go. knowing perhaps for the first time, tonight— that my guts have been telling me this.

but/and not knowing How to go.

being stuck in scarcity/impoverished mindsets. stuck on EBT/food stamps. stuck on under-earning overwork heroism and entanglements with exes. apathy in— it’s safe enough. safe enough.

But Is It What You Dream—?

***

i’m letting something Be Born, here. something in these days of chronic pain and prayer breaking into an unforeseen Lightness accompanied by one staggering Revelation after another.

a rooting back into the Grounding of what perdita finn called The Matrisphere. the place We Are All Actually From. the place where Things Can Move, and Flow. the place where the little girl with the charred legs can be carried out of the burning room in the sheltering, grounding arms and presence of The Mother. who walks then confidently, gently, into the twists and turns of the intestine-forests and Makes Healthy Things, New Things, Grow.

i have seen enough Impossible Things, now— i have been Such An Impossible Thing— that i know my ideology around this is as important as the physiology that is manifesting, announcing itself, for my attention.

I Have Been Map-Maker; so i will be Again.

because Someone Has To, in this lineage— these overlapping circles of lives.

and standing at the moving center of the labyrinth— the way i did at ghost ranch in new mexico in 2018, after taking a greyhound bus from NYC for 2 1/2 days— i will say Yes.

i will say Yes.

i will say Yes.

***

notes:

* i pooped right after writing this. as the sky is lightening. those of you who know me know how Miraculous this is.

* my manchester UK boyfriend sent me this key in one of the packages he sent me that summer 2021— after our abrupt breakup i got rid of so many things, but this i kept. these days, it has slowly made its way over to my altar.

the note says: ‘this key has also asked to be sent to you. it is the key of work & vocation. […] as you can see, it is broken— one day i put it in the lock, twisted, and that happened. at the time, work was also ‘broken’ for me— it had became separated from passion and vocation. […] i think this key has something for you as you transition out of socrates. please just do with it whatever feels appropriate!’ thank you, jez.

****

thank you, so much, to all the new subscribers/followers who have joined the journey. i didn’t know what this space would become, especially after becoming so used to writing on instagram for so many years— but this is so Different, and i’m now glad i have, and keep looking forward to returning to, this space.

i wrote this little reintroduction on instagram a day ago and maybe it will be useful to post it here:

HALLO‼️ i’m audrey nova. NYC born+raised, 1st generation italian-american. as of this month it’s 3 years since i moved on from my last full-time role as director of public programs for @socratespark. in this time i’ve been able to devote my life to further explorations of healing with/through the mythic/imaginal world, the earth, and in community. i offer adventurous, care-oriented online and in-person 1-on-1 journeys and group experiences. i’m interested in the holding of safe containers in which to experience the multiplicities of ourselves and communion with the imaginal and natural world, via/inside our own bodies. i’ve always been an imaginative kid, a wildchild raised by the urban mythic in queens and with learned room-to-sprawl in the catskill mountains. i’m deeply informed by my time in what is commonly known as ‘mental health crisis’ and suicidality, and am an empath and highly sensitive person (gifts often emerge through the wounds). one of my core stories is how the bipolar II diagnosis i was given in 2018 became a walk in Legend with a black wolf and a white wolf. i’ve been on a long and continuing journey with my digestive system, as well as investigating intergenerational trauma, codependency/enmeshment, guilt and shame— among zillions of other things. 😅 including, importantly, how to be in authentic dialogue with what is announcing itself in the body. 🔊 my archetypes are The Magician, The Explorer, and The Hero. if you ever saw poetic graffiti tagged ‘round queens with ♾️💗, that was me (i got arrested for it in 2015 😆). my daughter fleur is in the otherworld and will be 20 years old this year; i am open about my abortion experience and the incredulous story that brought her spirit/presence back to me, years later.🐝 (my life is, quite fantastically, unbelievable. miraculous. impossible.✨️) my favorite movies are ‘labyrinth’ and ‘the neverending story’!! i’ve been sharing my life on IG since 2012 and as of last year more expansively on my substack, the Angel; for wrestling. 🌟 thx for following along on my journey. all linx at my linktree for info on working with me, future storytelling gatherings, my writings + self-published books. 🌳 i’m Grateful. #morelife