I was 30 years old when I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. Psychosis ended my career in graduate school and my career path as a professor of 17-century British history. In fact, it brought terrible destruction and suffering to my life. I devolved into illness and broke from my family, friends, and school before anyone could stop me or retard the development of insanity in my brain. I lived for 7 months with madness all alone in a large city save for my delusions and the strangers who kept a discrete distance because I appeared distinctly frightening. Because I had tuition money for classes, I had enough money to sustain me during this period. That is, perhaps a tragedy that fueled the drama of my days.
I stayed in run-down apartments and sometimes seedy hotels. I pursued my belief that I was on the forefront of a resistance against the war that loomed across my country. In my head, I was a spy who worked to mitigate the presence of evil in the world, and I followed my delusions that told me both how to act and how to order my days. In reality, I did little but (mis)read papers and magazines, talking to myself aloud and in my head believing all the while that I was communicating with heads of state and formal government departments through the radio and TV.
At the end of 7 months of often sheer terror, I ran out of money and became even more desperate. In isolation and fear, I tried to harm myself. This is how the police found me and how I was admitted to a local mental hospital. My parents were finally notified of my whereabouts and learned for the first time that I was alive if horribly unwell. With gratitude, I record that they brought me home, away from the anonymous big city and a nightmare of over half a year. Once sane and in a safe environment, I was able to begin the long, arduous work of recovery.
This was how I made the acquaintance of my first psychiatrist who helped me take valiant steps toward well-being today. My parents found him through connections they had made in NAMI. He was the director of a mental hospital about 20 minutes from my home, in what had once been a more rural space but that was now a heavily developed urban district. This psychiatrist became a safe home for me too. After years of trial and error, he helped me find a regime of psychotropic drugs that kept the psychosis at bay while allowing me to feel like a whole person again with ordinary perception and functioning. Psychosis and the psychotropic drugs had robbed me of a natural experience of the world. Most of the time I felt as if I were speaking down a long tunnel at others or I constantly worried that hidden messages peppered conversations and media around me. It was draining, and I felt distinctly less than human. So, perception colors our ability to function in world.
My psychiatrist often assured me I would get well. It was very hard to believe. I had all the elements of recovery he pointed out to me. However, at the time health to me meant returning to graduate school and completing my PhD. I now realize that health meant something entirely different to him, something more like where I find myself today. My psychiatrist understood that I would rise from the cloud that fogged my mind. He predicted that I would function as a member of society once again. In my heart, I could hardly have confidence in what he said. It felt as if a large elephant were perched on my brain. It was difficult to think and to exercise rational cognitive functioning. Yet, I have to say that with my doctor’s encouragement the first stirrings of hope woke in my battered imagination. This sustained me through many hard years of hard struggle as we experimented with antipsychotics and doses to find one that was physically and mentally tolerable and let me feel like a person once more not an automaton who dragged her legs across a field of stubble to make it to some semblance of home. When I lost my psychiatrist to murder, it was a terrible blow to me and to my family. We all loved him unreservedly.
Yet, this is how I met his friend and colleague who has established her part in saving my life too. She was the director of the inhouse ward at the mental hospital and stayed close by when it was finally closed due to lack of interest by its current owners and the lack of an ability by the county and state to be able to run and sustain it. Like my former psychiatrist, she has worked diligently to improve my emotional and physical capacity for both joy and contentment, for health and strength through long illnesses and many setbacks. She has stood with me as I regained my footing and little by little began the task of finding what I could achieve in the face of obstacles such as a lack of an ability to read history anymore or even to concentrate long enough to read fiction for extended periods of time. She urged me to continue to engage with the world, even when I felt terrible despair.
It’s with perseverance and discipline that I explored one avenue after another to see what I might do now. I failed a lot, most of the time actually. I tried a number of different activities involved with writing. At first, I tried to research and write a history book on piracy in the early Caribbean. I spent over a year or two on that project. When I couldn’t complete it due to cognitive deficiencies, I was very discouraged. Next, I wrote historical articles for Pirates Magazine out of Baltimore, MD. Once I even made the cover issue. Yet the same effects of the medicine undermined my ability to do this for more than a year. I just couldn’t continue the research no matter how hard I tried, nor for that matter, how badly I wanted it. I failed at this in the end too. Hopelessness seemed to be my boon companion.
No matter what, I wanted to exercise my brain, to use the skills I had developed in graduate school. My new psychiatrist never discouraged me from this course. She supported my dreams no matter how foolish or distant they seemed. She stood by me while I grieved and never once insisted that I volunteer at a low-level job to fill my time. I believe that knowing my heart she supported my efforts to fulfill my dreams although they appeared unattainable at the time. She made it possible for me to pick up my life like some battered luggage by being the porter to my hopes. She checked in my bags and made sure they made it to their right destination. Never once did she suggest that I do otherwise than my heart prompted me.
Then, shockingly, 1 day it happened for me. On that day, I decided to write a poem. As a young student, I had originally wanted to be a poet. The day I was introduced to Shakespeare’s sonnets I thought to myself, this is what I want to do with my life. Those sonnets spoke to me with a joy that religion or love brings to a person. They filled my soul. But I had given up poetry, believing I hadn’t the talent to be successful. This was why I wanted to become a professor and write nonfiction. I thought it suited my skill set better and I put my young desire aside. Now here I was, an adult and an opportunity presented itself. I had the time and inclination to experiment with poetry again, to suit myself, to pursue my first calling as I thought of it. Why not write poetry again just to exercise the mind and spirit in conjunction together?
After a year or more of practice and finding out what my style was (so different from contemporary convention), I found that I could write poetry again, no matter how sick I felt on the inside or out. No matter how cognitively challenged I felt, I could always focus and find metaphor. I could concentrate and write for long periods of time even when my brain felt like jelly from the side effects of the antipsychotics. I found I could even complete whole books. It took me more than double the time to engage and finish a project than it once might have but I was able to do it. I could do it and that has changed my life and sincerely fulfilled my dreams. It comes not only as a delight but as a thrill of surprise that the bulb I once switched off has become the lantern that lights my day. In 10 years, I completed 2 books of poetry that I labored over with great devotion and even greater discipline.
However, this isn’t the end of the story. The best part is kept back for last. After a trying year of book submissions, I was able to find a publisher. My first book of poems was released on Halloween of 2018 with Belle Isle Books of Brandylane Publishers. Its title is Pirates and Spooks, Beware! and is a children’s book of verse for ages 6 and up. In it, I focused on pirates about whom I knew so much by now. Romping, rollicking pirates rampage through my poems. Then I added in spunky and spooky ghouls to fill out the book for a child’s imagination. Illustrated by a good friend of mine, the book is now selling comfortably on Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. I hope to finally sell enough books to earn royalties within a year or 2 and maybe even find myself in a book store 1 day? To my great delight, the book was well received by the Midwest Book Review who has said that Pirates and Spooks, Beware! will “prove to be an immediate and enduringly popular addition to . . . poetry book collections for young readers.” This gives my heart hope that I have chosen the right path in life, that I have stumbled somehow onto greener pastures and rolling hills.
My second book of adult poetry will be released with the same publisher around winter of 2019. I begin work on editing the verse with Brandylane in the beginning of February of 2019. You can see my book offerings on my website at Susanweinerbooks.com. Also, at one point, I was even honored to be asked by a European doctor to write a chapter on mental illness for the book Psychotic Disorders, An Update, published by InTech Open in 2018. It’s available to read for free on the Internet. Really, my heart overflows with the bright sun of promises hoped for and fulfilled.
I couldn’t have hoped for more had I never been ill. After what seemed like a daunting, long search, I found I’m able to write fiction and autobiography. I would never have predicted this and was as surprised as anyone to discover it was something I could commit to and accomplish. And so, I have begun a small career in writing, something I had almost given up on in despair. I credit psychiatrists with providing the fields in which I sowed my dreams. Without the opportunities they made real, I would not have achieved my hopes and most longed for ambition. Whether they were contacting me to write chapters or supporting my steps back to health, I am grateful for the commitment they showed to one whose life was upended (but never, ever destroyed) by that creeping and devastating shadow of mental illness. So, perhaps it is appropriate to note that for me, hope has borne true and that the light has returned to what only seemingly and for a time went dark.