Let me tell this the way it lives in my body, not as a report, not as a case study, but as a quiet conversation you and I might be having by a fire, late at night, when the truth finally has room to breathe.
By the early 1990s I was already seasoned. I’d been interviewed hundreds of times around the world, appeared in documentaries, written books and journals, lived several creative lives at once. In the early 1970’a I was a head nurse on an acute psychiatric unit in the South Bronx at a time when it was considered the most dangerous place in the country. That context matters, because it explains why intuition wasn’t a luxury for us—it was survival.
The unit was a long, narrow hall with twelve single rooms, one bed per room, built for people in extreme psychosis. Patients had ten days—no more—for us to reassess, stabilize, sometimes save them from being crushed by the system or by themselves. It was an experimental unit, led by a chief psychiatrist who believed in stripping things down to their raw essentials. Every morning we threw out the rulebook, sat in a circle, and faced whatever showed up. It was messy, human, and alive.
At noon on a Tuesday as I walked from my desk near the entrance, past the rooms on the left, I stepped into the one empty room at the far end of the hall. And I smelled smoke. Not metaphorical smoke. Real smoke. I called in staff who were nearby. They laughed at me. Asked what drugs I was on. They smelled nothing. I let it go—but something in me didn’t.
That night I was on edge in a way I couldn’t explain. Sleep wouldn’t come easily. I woke up before dawn and went to work much earlier than usual. I didn’t have a story for why I was so nervous, just a physical knowing that would not let me relax.
By 3 a.m., we had three new admissions. A man brought in by the police, and two women, also brought in separately by police. They did not know each other. By mid-morning, I watched the man walking down the hall with one of the women. Again, no obvious reason for alarm—but my attention sharpened.
It was Wednesday. Every Wednesday at noon, the chief of psychiatry for New York State, Dr. Ed Kaufman, held an open teaching forum for psychiatric residents from the Albert Einstein complex, right in our unit. The meeting room was down the right hall leading from the communal living room where my desk sat by the entrance to the unit. After learning that I participated by helping Dr. Kaufman answer the trainees I was invited to stay for all the meetings.
Next door was detox. The building itself was old Lincoln Hospital, and above the entrance was a sign that never failed to stop me cold: “Home for Retired Slaves.” The fire hoses in the building were cracked, full of holes, practically ornamental. No one expected anything here to go wrong because no one expected anything here to matter.
And yet.
This particular Wednesday I entered the meeting at noon. “Fire!” that was Byron, a social worker on the unit. I felt something shocking: relief. Not because of danger, not because of chaos, but because the unnamed dread had revealed itself. The body knows long before the mind catches up. That day confirmed something I had already been living but hadn’t yet fully claimed—there are forms of perception that don’t ask permission, don’t wait for consensus, and don’t explain themselves in advance.
If you’re reading this, the benefit isn’t the drama of a fire or the nostalgia of a dangerous era in psychiatry. The benefit is permission. Permission to trust the subtle signal that doesn’t match the room. Permission to honor the discomfort that has no immediate narrative. Permission to understand that intuition isn’t mystical fluff—it’s data, gathered through lived experience, pattern recognition, and deep listening.
You don’t need to be a nurse, an artist, or a psychic detective to apply this. In your own work, your relationships, your creative life, there are moments when something feels “off” long before you can articulate why. Most people override that signal to stay polite, productive, or palatable. I learned early that ignoring it can be far more dangerous than acting on it.
What you can take from this, for your own purposes, is simple and radical: pay attention to what arrives before language. Notice when your body tightens, when sleep won’t come, when you’re compelled to arrive early, look twice, or linger. Those moments are not interruptions to your life—they are guidance. And sometimes, they are the very thing that keeps the fire from consuming more than it has to.
Warmly, Nancy
