Art Through Healing

It was the 7-year anniversary of my first spoken word performance recently. I cherish the memory when after spending a long ‘Winter’ cooling my heels, I came back from some loose mania to re-emerge as a poet and writer. They are creative vocations which I recommend to anybody looking to heal from their own dark times.

Poetry has been medicine for me.

Not for the satisfaction that an artful rhyme brings. Not for the audience’s applause, although that is addictive and can make up for the poor pay, and occasional scorn that comes with writing poetry. What I didn’t expect from writing, was the catharsis that comes from telling my story. It has been the most valuable gift from my ongoing practice.

Catharsis. What a great word! I think whenever one hears it, they intuitively feel it’s meaning. Merriam-Webster defines catharsis as: ‘the purification or purgation of the emotions such as pity and fear … that brings about spiritual renewal or release from tension’. Catharsis through poetry, has helped me understand the breakdown that floored me 14 years ago. A psychotic episode that at 31, was an unexpected crack in my convenient reality.

I was on the way up when it happened. I had friends and parties, a house, a husband and a small but promising business. I had ticked so many boxes that kept me distracted from the wheels that had started spinning a little too quickly. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise when they fell off? I hadn’t slept properly for a year. Ice had built in my marriage and old friends became confused with my late nights and rambling posts. So, waking up psychotic should not have been the devastating surprise that it was. But it was.

I ran away that morning and was found, days later, walking along the Great Ocean Road. A police man drove alongside me and gently suggested that I go to hospital. He had a kind face and softly he said he would take me there if I wanted. I wonder now, how many times he’s had to help women like me in such states of despair – leaving hard places. A short stay at Barwon Hospital followed. Then a tentative diagnosis. Bipolar.

I’ve played with that word for so long. As I spent years retreating into the comforting folds of my parents’ old couch, unable to work and with a divorce looming. As I toyed with different Psychiatrists and medications. Lithium. Latuda. Lamotrigine. It took two years of rest before the intensity of my mood swings eased and gave me breath between peaks.

It has taken 14 years to decide I won’t be shamed by my illness. Of course, it has given me pain but the experience has also given me authenticity, creativity, truth, beauty, depth and compassion. I am more than just a diagnosis. I have also become more because of it.

I didn’t come here to write this though. I came here to tell you that I have turned these past ‘hurts’ into fodder. Into poems like the very first one I wrote seven years ago. As I pressed that old pen into paper and made those crucial indentations with ink, I had no set intentions other than to noodle some brain farts down. But the pen flew and before I knew it, I’d written a poem called “Trophy Wife”. A rhyming ditty where I imagined myself locked up and trapped – like a cat, in a cold house, pacing, itching to escape my loveless marriage. It was the first poem I’d written since high school and the first one I’d ever written of my own free will. For no other reason than to relieve the pressure that had built in my body and in my brain since my divorce and breakdown. It felt good to write.

I read it back and I was satisfied that it captured that old life accurately. I sent it to close friends and they agreed it needed to be heard. I didn’t even know then that ‘spoken word’ was a thing but I googled ‘poetry event’ in a sweaty lather of excitement and as if by magic, that same evening, a bar in Brunswick was holding a poetry night. Fuelled with recklessness, I went and before I knew it, I’d put my hand up to read.

When my name was called, my feet turned to jelly and my hands trembled. I’d read in front of audiences before but never like this. Never my own deep and personal words. At first, my voice was unsteady but I started. Then the chatter and idle clinking of glasses fell away and I knew they were all listening. I steadied. I started stretching out pauses, increasing the tension intuitively. Some words I whispered into the mic and some rattled like machine gun staccato. For five minutes, I held the room. At times they gasped and at the end there was silence before the applause came.

I felt seen. I felt validated and heard and I felt incredibly brave – not just for reading my words out but for having written them in the first place.

What was more incredible though, was the way that my story resonated with so many people. People with their own tales of love lost, grief and despair came up to me that night and told me how certain lines hit them. How they were reminded of their own journeys out of personal hells. It was incredibly powerful to find, in a room full of poets and people, that we were not alone in our trauma or our recovery.

It is for these reasons that I have continued to develop my poetry and writing practice to this day. Some days I write little or nothing. Some days I sit down at the computer or an old pen and notepad and lose hours before realising that night has sunk and it’s time to return to the real world. In a similar fashion to my first poem, I have delved into my first psychotic break and found comfort to have restored myself to a place where I could write about it artfully at arm’s length. That piece was published in print in a great literary journal and it made my father so proud, he almost forgot the tears he’d shed when he had to pick me up from the hospital that first day. My exploration and interrogation of life and all it’s dark and quirky corridors has helped me understand myself better and I am better for it. Truly, art and poetry are powerful medicines.

Connect with Maja

If you’d like to read some of Maja’s work, you can find her poem Invocation in our Resources section.
To follow more of Maja’s writing or connect with her, visit:
Instagram: @this.fresh.hell
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