Fan Questions "Where the hell have you been?"

So where in the hell have I been? This is a fair question. When I walked away from doing Era Nocturna back in 2012 my genuine intent was to never make music again. I had had enough of slogging through shows singing the same shit over and over. I had had enough of dragging gear through the ice and snow and the heat and humidity to play in hole-in-the-wall clubs where the response was typically mediocre due to the location in which we were playing. Western Massachusetts isn’t exactly welcoming to goth/electro music. Joke maps say, “here there be dragons” but in reality it’s metal country and they don’t take kindly to us geek musicians who use computers almost exclusively to produce music. It is what it is and it takes all kinds.

Behind the scenes and inside my head there was more going on though. I have never kept my mental illness a secret and I have bordered on unapologetic when speaking of it as this is a subject that makes many extremely uncomfortable. But you know what? I don’t care. Not talking about something has never made it go away and I never saw merit in hiding who and what I am. Unfortunately a lot of people get caught in the cross fire of my issues and it’s something I’ve worked very hard to fix but my past is extremely messy and my professional and personal relationships have suffered due to the shit I live with. If you’re new to the club here’s the deal: I have type 2 bipolar disorder that has been resistant to treatment and I also live with complex PTSD and dissociative disorder. This translates to a person who can be very hard to work with, live with, and be friends with. For THAT I do apologize but I don’t and won’t apologize for my illness.

So yeah, I ended Era Nocturna in 2012. In 2013 I got married to Shaun, whom many of you know as Era Nocturna’s live drummer, and I continued to work as a medical assistant up through early 2014. That is when I basically lost my shit… I believe it was around April that it hit a critical mass resulting in a full-blown psychotic break but, hindsight being 20/20, I knew it had started long before that and that is essentially why Era Nocturna ended if I’m to be honest with you and with myself. I was overwhelmed by life and I was completely out of control. So there’s that.

Where are we in the tale now? Ah yes, April 2014. So I up and quit my job as a medical assistant and I proceed to tear my life apart… literally. I ripped myself down to the base of who I was and rebuilt until I was close to who I once was but even then it was incomplete. Just the same I was approached by my old friend Jason with the offer to distribute my music online. Seeing this as an opportunity to reinvent myself musically I renamed the band and went forward with the release. Initially I was very excited and promoted the crap out of it but the damage I had done when I “killed” Era Nocturna was extensive and people were not really too keen on returning to see what other bullshit I was going to spew when I was having a bad day. Fair enough. So I stepped back once again and started getting my head on straight. Meanwhile I took a job working as a mental health recovery counselor to make ends meet. I thought at first it would just be a job to pay the bills but as time went on I found that I was actually making a difference with the clients that I worked with each day. I also found that they were making a difference in MY life as well. They showed me what was important and when I saw that, I was one step closer to reclaiming myself in total.

In the last few weeks I’ve felt something spark within me. Perhaps it has been allowing myself to finally remember the dear friends I have lost to untimely deaths that has brought me back. One memory in particular has me in Brooklyn sitting in a kitchen drinking wine and pouring my heart and soul out to one friend in particular and half way through my venting I got up to take a piss and when I came back I looked in my bag only to find that the pills I was looking for were gone. As you can guess, being the junkie that I was, I went off. I sounded like Batman in “The Dark Knight” hollering “Where are they?” Only I wasn’t looking for my friend and her man, I wanted my shit back. My friend’s response was to shake his head at me, take my hands and tell me that I was worth more than the “bullshit in that bottle.” He even took away my wine and told me I was done as long as I was around him. I left, furious, and rode the train back to my place that I was sharing with my ex-husband (who was cheating on me at the time) and I vowed I would never speak to him again but my phone rang as I was walking back to the house and it was my friend checking to see if I was okay. The next day we talked again and he said, “There are worse things than death and you’re shining the fucking lights to get them to find you. You’re better than that.” I didn’t stop using at that time but in the mental health world we have this thing called “harm reduction” when it comes to continuing bad habits with the intent to lessen their negative effects. Why I remembered all of that is quite plain. Because of my PTSD I carry many bottles of “shit” that are meant to keep me from going over the edge and the addictive nature of one of them often causes me to feel the urge to take more than I should. One day when I was reaching for the bottle I remembered that encounter and it hit me, I was still waving that light looking for the demons to come back and break me down and I knew what it was I had to do. I had to go back to my music because that was my old friend, that was my way to cope, that was who I am… plain and simple.

It is a new year now, we’re only a few weeks into it, and in the last 17 days I have shed the last of the effects of the break I suffered between 2012 and 2014. I have accepted that I am perfectly imperfect… a beautiful disaster at times. I have accepted that I have burned more bridges than I have built. I have accepted that I am not the best at what I do but I try hard… every day. I have accepted that there are many who hate me but the ones who do love me are worth a hundred to one of those that don’t. Each day I am thankful for the fact that I am able to try again and knowing that it’s people like Shaun who fight for me and people like Vicki, Peter, Kenny, Shelly, Alicia, and Rachel who took my shit and showed me that even us monsters have our good sides.

So if you’re looking for a short answer of where I’ve been and why it’s taken me so long to make music again, I can’t give you one. I can only give you what I’ve said and I can only say thank you if you’ve read this far because you are on this journey with me and you haven’t given up on me. There are no words of thanks that I can offer for that but know that whoever you are, you have my gratitude.