Poetry as therapy

As a result of my treading through the seemingly dense (but actually quite banal) morass of experiences with diagnosed schizophrenia and psychotic episodes in my poetry, I was invited to speak at Contemplative Traditions and Psychotherapy, an international conference organised by my former therapist Borut Škodlar at the Slovene Society in September of 2023. I attended a few of the other lectures and conversations; some were fantastic, while others consisted of nothing more than quasi-intellectual masturbation (as is expected at such happenings). I distinctly remember an (I assume) unprepared Slovene professor of philosophy babbling about the homonymy of the word ‘spring’ as if he had stumbled upon the idiom ‘spring has sprung’ only moments before he was seated in front of a microphone. I also noticed that the line-up of the conference consisted mostly of professionals in the fields of psychotherapy, philosophy and spirituality. I half-jokingly commented that I was invited as a case study, an example of a psycho. However – and I told this to the attendees as well – due to my exhibitionistic and self-involved nature, I truly did not mind.

My on-stage conversation with Škodlar was titled ‘Poetic Ways of Transforming Existential Pain and Finding Meaning’, therefore we tried to focus on whether writing poetry can be therapeutic. My take was (and still is) that poetry can be a medium for the confirmation of the self, a welcome trodden path in the search for a unified mind, an exercise in believing your thoughts and memories and in understanding how and why some could have betrayed you – an especially important exercise for people with schizotypal tendencies. As Jennifer Huang put it: ‘Poetry is what helps me remember that even in my fragments, I am whole.’

However, all those things, at least for me, hold true once you are no longer in fragments, once the mind is in recovery from a psychotic episode. When the nurses and doctors at the closed ward posed a violent threat to me, the fellow patients were actors in my own personal Truman Show and every day was guided by plotting how to escape the torturous alien prison I had ended up in, I was not able to write poetry – I was in a state of perpetual revelation. The only thing I was able to do with the shards of my shattered mind was cut myself on them. 

When I mentioned I was privy to some fantastic lectures at the conference, I mostly had the Danish psychiatrist Josef Parnas’ in mind. Listening to him felt like a cathartic re-examination of the underbelly of my first psychosis. I was in constant dialogue with his words. 

‘Delusions are not errors or mistakes about the empirical world.’ They might have seemed like untruths, but they were just things I had seen, heard and felt, projected through a psychotic kaleidoscope. ‘There is a certain truth that cannot compare to a neurotypical definition of truth.’ Everything was connected and if it was not, I would find a way to make sure it was. ‘We should not correct a delusional patient – that does not make sense. We should help them reach certain insights.’ My recovery was only possible because of the gruellingly slow chipping away at the mountain of my convictions, at my alternate reality. ‘Conviction precedes the content.’ When I was a child, I was constantly convinced I was being watched, especially when I was alone at home. ‘Patients report that they had a tendency towards hyper-reflexivity as children.’ Night time was reserved for obsessing over the myriads of ways I could have hurt people and not be aware of it. The same way they hurt me. ‘Patients report a tendency towards self-monitoring – the subject jumps between two places, two quasi-subjects, which are in fact one subject.’ Becoming aware of my queerness at an early age, I had to constantly monitor the height of my voice, the limpness of my wrists, the sway of my hips, in order to be able to hide. A horrifying realisation hit me – is my queerness, the aspect of my identity I had spent years trying to defend, accept and love, one of the reasons I developed schizophrenia? It is, in a way. But not queerness itself, rather the everyday queerphobia of the community I grew up in, the homophobia, biphobia and transphobia I fought so diligently to hide myself away from.

My schizophrenia taught me (among other things) how unstable and unknowable the world is, and, therefore, helped me develop a less possessive attitude towards it. As Kristijan Sirnik summarised it during his lecture at the conference: ‘The illusion of control is in itself psychotic.’ However, because of my attempted suicide at the psychiatric hospital, it was imperative for me to settle on an interpretation of the disintegration of my reality – this is where poetry comes in. The title of my conversation with Škodlar might seem cliché, but after years of recovery poetry truly helped me transform all that confusion and pain into something I see as greater. Writing (with the intention of publishing, which I later realised) a collection of prosaic, narrative-driven poems about my first psychosis demanded that I make sense of my experiences – not to find a proverbial silver lining, not at all, as I intentionally refuse to completely compartmentalise my existence, but to close a chapter of my life and dare to look towards what is to come. In a way I agree with Stanisław Barańczak who wrote: ‘[R]egardless of theme and specific address, poetry is always some kind of protest… That’s why all the metaphors and rhythms – it’s just a way of putting the world’s chaotic gibberish in some meaningful order and restoring the original weight to abused words. That’s why all the concreteness and conciseness – to resist the engulfing power of the world’s empty abstractions and statistical generalities. That’s why all the speaking in first person singular and seeing things from a strictly individual perspective – it’s poetry’s way of standing up to the world whenever it tries to elbow the individual aside and off the stage.’

Barańczak’s words remind me of the Slovene poet Karlo Hmeljak’s. I organise a weekly poetry workshop and book club in Kamnik, my Slovene hometown, and each month we invite a renowned Slovene poet for a reading. Hmeljak’s poetry is extreme in its linguistic experimentation – at some points in his collection Zategadalj he communicates his reality only through syllables, sounds and avantgarde wordplay. When he visited our book club and I asked him about his poetic voice, he said (and I hope I am doing justice to his thoughtful reply) that his poetry is a response to both the fact that we use so much unnecessary hogwash in everyday conversation and the fact that communicating one’s inner world truly and sincerely is so very rare, if not downright impossible. Hmeljak spoke about how, in his younger years, he tried to understand the mind of his literary idol Tomaž Šalamun, who was and still is an idol to many. For a considerable period of time, he read only Šalamun’s poetry as an experiment to see whether he could write in Šalamun’s voice, become him in a literary sense. As far as I understand Hmeljak, the experiment failed.

I believe many poets pursue a similar, mirrored goal – not the becoming of an other (it being an obvious impossibility), but the becoming of self through writing. The question posed by artists who use language as their medium is: ‘Can I ever truly express my existence in its fullness? Or must we be satisfied with only the brief glimpses into ourselves that we offer the world?’ Language seems so awfully limiting in this quest.

For a schizophrenic, the problem is further complicated by the fact that psychoses are often accompanied by a fractured self. During my psychotic episode, the lines between who I was and who the people around me were had been blurred, to put it mildly. I could hear a sentence that a fellow patient said and wonder whether it was him the thought grew in or whether it was me that placed it in him. (‘Perhaps he had sent it to me – to adopt it and see it as my own – long before that? Since when have our souls been enmeshed?’)

Writing poetry was and still is, in a sense, therapeutic for me. It took a lot of time for me to be able to even think about the things I had experienced, and even more time to finally find the words that are closest to what I had felt. Once I did, it brought a sense of relief: I do have a story, not just bits and pieces.

One of the last questions from the audience at the conference was: ‘If you thought the closed ward of the psychiatric hospital was The Truman Show, did you ever meet the director?’ I had to pause and think before I replied: ‘I did not. I did, however, recognise some of the other patients as co-stars, not actors. Those were the people I saw as being in the same predicament as me.’ At the conference I did not yet realise or remember that the way I had tried to connect with those co-stars (who probably seemed as such to me only because I got along with them) was through writing. I wrote poems with one – we exchanged a piece of paper back and forth, line after line – and movie scripts with another. I am no longer in contact with either, but these experiences also help me understand the power of the written word – its potential for intimacy, connection, honesty and, yes – therapy.