Why subscribe?
I release each chapter of the story once per week, both in the newsletter and on the website. You can follow the story by subscribing to the newsletter; this writing will stay free, now and always.
Once per month, on the full moon, I share a short essay on topics relating to the substance of the story: living in seclusion, building community, processing trauma and grief, conscious love, and the art of surrender have been explored to date.
Catch up on the story so far by downloading the free ebook editions of Surrender Now.
Surrender Now is a memoir of vivid and extreme states of consciousness: set between Melbourne and Byron Bay between the years 2010 and 2013.
The novel chronicles my recovery from amphetamine addiction, adventures on the spiritual path, and falling in love with a mystic at a meditation ashram. I have written through life experience to illustrate the flow of feelings and events that align with the miraculous; that is, how combinations of ordinary circumstances bring about powerful shifts in consciousness.
Praise for Surrender Now
I will again recommend Nicola’s Surrender Now because she embodies the wild woman archetype like no one else. Nicola’s serialized newsletter is a journey full of brokenness, healing, inspiration, frolic, and magnificence. She handles this myriad range of expressions with humor, sensual grace, and unparalleled rawness. Her eloquence and wisdom permeate through the essence of her work encouraging her readers to heal while showing them all the messy bits that made her journey unique and yet relatable.
— Swarnali Mukherjee, Berkana.
Nicola’s work shines light on the consonance between storytelling and life. It inspires readers, like myself, to embark on a journey into discovering the sublime and transcendent, as we navigate through the material joys and pains of reality.
— Josh Pillay, Wait! Just Listen
This is powerful, introspective writing about ‘miracles and the miraculous’ in life. Nicola writes with honesty and courage, even about difficult thoughts and emotions that many of us find impossible to confront. A newsletter to be read in quiet.
— Rohini Chowdhury and Shaiontoni Bose, The Story Birds
When I read Nicola's stories, I often pause and think, "damn, that's a stunning line." Like no other writer I follow, her words reflect the beautiful yet terrifying workings of my inner landscape. Her motherly wisdom drips from the screen into my consciousness. I'm better for it.
— Alex Olshonsky, Deep Fix
Reading your writing every week, and talking about it with you, has been a steady and cumulative source of inspiration for me. Your voice is so clear, moving so naturally and seemingly effortlessly between the contemplative, the hilarious, the reverent, the literary and the colloquial. It so you, it's so us, and it has unlocked the passion and self-belief in me to rediscover and develop my own literary voice... I am devouring and savouring every morsel as soon as it arrives in my inbox, and talking to you in my head about it..
— Josephine Collins, The Way Out
Surrender Now is beautiful and poetic as much as it is profound. Nicola masterfully reveals the world of a spiritual journey dancing within the blossoming of love. I highly recommend Surrender Now, especially for anyone on their own spiritual adventure.
— Renee Faber, The Creator’s Compass
Through pure-hearted storytelling, Surrender Now shares a message of letting go that so many in this 'modern world of control' need to hear. Nicola shares her whole self in her writing, evident from her pieces' emotional depth, which has made me both laugh and tear up. Surrender Now is emerging from a place of love for life and writing, a wholesome example for me as a novice writer writing my own close-to-my-heart stories.
— Jibran el Bazi, Meaning-Making
Synopsis of Surrender Now
Here is the story about how this manuscript came about. Over Easter weekend in 2021, my friend Daphne ended her own life. Her death was the fifth of my Melbourne friends who died young due to substance-related causes or suicide. In the week that I mourned her I lay sleepless through the nights beside my son, who had just turned one, and whom I would also lose before the year was out.
As I lay sleepless through those nights, offering the breast to Raphael and thinking about Daphne, the thought that kept coming to me was who will be next? How many more loved ones will I lose to overdoses and deaths of despair? And it was then that I began to write Volume I, 'Breakdown and Recovery,' inside my mind; the story of my own recovery from substance abuse and chronic anxiety.
Volume I begins at a low point in my life: as a vain, conceited twenty-two year-old with wild ambitions, I obtained a prescription for dextroamphetamine from a quack psychologist to help me cope with my Honours year at university. What ensued was a protracted and painful breakdown, which the story recounts through the cycle of acute emotional peaks and troughs abetted by my addiction.
This story was written expressly for young people who are struggling with anxiety and substance abuse. Somehow I thought that by writing down all of the preconditions and states of feeling that led me from breakdown to recovery, I could prevent more people from dying.
When my infant son died suddenly in July 2021, once again I found myself sleepless in the nights, inwardly contorted with grief and despair. Raphael had been my world and I had been devoted to him. People took care of me during the days but nothing consoled me through the nights. The only thing that took me out of my misery was writing my memories down, and finding the meaning of what I have lived through in the process.
In those nights, it felt almost like Raphael was sitting beside me. And this angelic presence urged me, gently, to write about the ordinary miracles that have shaped who I am.
Volume II, 'Adventure and Awakening,' is about what happened when I recovered enough from the addictions and fixations described in the first volume to let go of my situation in life and start something new completely. I left Melbourne in pursuit of something radically different from what I had experienced up until that time.
I went with very little money and no plans to Byron Bay, where I lived amongst the transients who camped illegally in the sand dunes. In their midst, I encountered many extraordinary people who made it possible and practical for me to withdraw permanently from society at large. The story describes the far-out people I met and what I learned from them in my quest to live in harmony with nature; eventually, I established myself in a secluded forest cabin in the hinterland to pursue a life of contemplation and adventure. .
Volume III, ‘Love and Awareness,’ is about what happened when an enigmatic and mysterious series of circumstances converged to bring me into contact with a most remarkable person. We collided into love in a most extraordinary setting: an ashram in the hinterland of Byron Bay, which struck me from the outset as being rather like a cult.
Even so, the relationship that commenced has outlasted every conceivable mischance, tragedy, and unexpected upheaval that could possibly be thrown at two lovers on the path of self-realisation. From the moment I met him, the whole world changed: he reflected a truth I had been yearning to find, and I devoted myself to the life we have shared ever since, a life of love and awareness.
I did not know how tightly wound up I had been in my dreams of glory until he started to unravel me: the story describes my upheaval, my intoxication, my gradual surrender to love. There was no way I could pretend to be the person I had been before when it was clear that he saw through me: there was no turning back to any ordinary way of life once his world had opened up to me.
All the strange, mystical and incredible transformations that I have written about in Surrender Now are true to life, though I have taken liberties in the telling of it; my own thoughts and impressions frame everything that took place, and my perceptions as a narrator are not always reliable.
Why unpaid?
I don’t want your money. You can keep it!
This story is offered freely. I hope that you may find this work helpful in your time of need. Everything I share presents the truth of my own experience.
The profile picture and cover art on this website are the wonderful work of Oliver Hunter.
To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.
