Madeline Roth was diagnosed with schizoaffective bipolar disorder at the age of 26 in 2018. She is a writer, podcaster, activist, and artist based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her work centers on themes of spirituality, connection to collective consciousness, and the rights of the natural world.
When I was eleven, I checked out The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley from my local library. I can’t remember which poems I read, just that the text was tiny and in two columns down the page. I asked my mom to help me interpret the poems but she told me if I wanted to read Shelley, I could figure his poems out on my own.
I have been an avid reader of poetry since my youth. The library was my portal to poets. My favorite book to check out as a teenager was The Hell with Love: Poems to Mend a Broken Heart, a collection by Mary D. Esselman and Elizabeth Ash Velez. I was so infatuated with the idea of being in love. I wasn’t sure how to go about flirting or finding a boyfriend or girlfriend but was fascinated by this thing that held so much power. The words of poets talking about being in love, out of love, longing for love, hating love, rejoicing in love, being over love, I couldn’t get enough.
I majored in English Literature in college and my horizons were pushed beyond odes to Aphrodite into works about God, time, nature, the collective unconscious, and beyond. I read a lot of contemporary poetry on my own time because I worried about becoming an acolyte of top hits poets. I didn’t want to become a meme of a girl who gets a BA in English and proclaims she has an exclusive and innovative relationship to the texts of Gwendolyn Brooks or Robert Frost.
I was relatively unscathed by schizoaffective bipolar disorder during my college years. I completed my degrees without too much fuss and went to work. As I inched towards my psychotic break at 25, my love of reading books and poems fell to the wayside as I dove headlong into the contemporary pop culture zeitgeist. It was 2016 and everything was politics, politics, politics. I spent more time on Twitter and Instagram than with books.
As my symptoms became overwhelming, I turned away from everything all texts, and in on myself. My screen time was about 20 minutes a day for years, a notable accomplishment for some but just proof I was checked out from the world of work and the daily tidal wave of text, photos, and videos on social media. I tried to read books, but the voices I hallucinated told me to stop reading. Stop reading novels, stop reading memoirs, stop reading poetry, stop reading the Bible. So I did. I would do anything to make the voices happy, to fawn in an attempt to make them a little kinder, to be the good girl I have always been again, the girl who never got in trouble. Who just wanted to read love poems and get in on this thing called love.
It has been a long journey of hospitalizations, psychiatry appointments, therapy, and medication. I started a new medication in April of 2023 and it has been life-changing. I can read again. I spend more time on my phone than I should but I relish the digital connection. I have begun to process my experience of prolonged psychosis and living in altered states through reconnecting with the written word. I got a new library card and get a thrill each time I bring new books home.
I have changed my relationship to the OG poets. Leading up to Valentine’s Day, I read Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. The text came alive like it never had before for me. Some people say Romeo and Juliet is a terrible love story because they are infatuated teens who die in the end. So be it. The balcony scene is the most romantic thing I have ever read. It spoke to my teenage self longing for my first kiss and my contemporary 32-year-old self longing for a love to end my wanderings.
In searching for resonance to my experience, I find myself drawn back and back to the poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” by Emily Dickinson.
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading - treading - till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through -
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum -
Kept beating - beating - till I thought
My mind was going numb -
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space - began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here -
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then –
This poem encapsulates so much of my experience. I spent years with auditory hallucinations tormenting me from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed. It certainly felt like “a Plank in Reason, broke,” for I could not find a solid emotional or mental footing to launch into creative work or even basic daily tasks like showering or cooking. I started a new medication a year ago and it was like a new world opened up to me. I am no longer a slave to the voices in my head, though they still talk to me every day.
My hope for my life is that I can be “Finished knowing – then –” when all is said and done. I want to know I lived each day with my heart full of love and connected to my higher power. I want to spend the rest of my days in peace and comfort, being of service to those in need and a friend to everyone who I meet. I want to live in peace with the hallucinations, not in fear or anger, but a gentle acceptance. The numbness I have felt because of my illness has started to fade away and I can feel again. Not wild, extreme emotions, but gentle feelings guiding me as I navigate an often cruel and complex world.
It is spring and the flowers are in bloom. The temperature is like my mind, some days hot and some days cold. Sometimes hot and cold on the same day. I have learned to adjust to the conditions. I let it come. The good and the bad. The profound and the profane. I am grateful I am alive to see another spring. I feel myself coming back to myself. The doors to creativity that were shut during the worst of my symptoms have opened a crack and I am able to see the light. As I continue with my writing and my podcast, I step into the light and let myself shine.
My mental illness no longer controls me. It has been an adjustment. I need medication to stay steady and probably will need medication for the rest of my life. I used to see this as a failure. Now, I accept medication as a tool to help me fulfill my purpose on Earth. When I was first diagnosed with schizoaffective bipolar, it felt like a funeral. It felt like a part of me died, the normal and decent part of me, and I was a walking decaying corpse stinking up any room I entered. I felt hated and shameful, a scary crazy lady. Disability scares people. I think the world sees schizophrenia as terrifying. It certainly has been terrifying to experience. Yet I am not a scary person. I am gentle and kind, thankful for all my blessings and generous.
My mind may never be what it once was and that is okay. Now that I am stable on my medication, I like my mind better than ever before. I can meditate without a single thought or hallucination breaking through and do so every day. Meditation helps me connect with God and has been healing after years of constant mental intrusions. It helps me regulate my emotions and stay in a healthy range of feelings. I can read books and poems again and understand their symbols and metaphors. It feels so good to dive into words and stories and let them work on me. I am even working on writing my own book which should be done this summer.
Great art comes from great pain. I read about the lives of artists and they are often not happy stories. Tales of severe mental illness and substance abuse abound, yet those who struggled so intensely with their mental health also created some of humanity’s greatest works of art. If you read the stories closely, you will find this art was created during times of relative health and stability as part of the healing process from the acute periods of illness. I could not create during the worst of my illness. During this time of healing, I have been blessed to have a whole new world of expression open up to me. My creativity has a newfound depth and resonance because of my illness and the act of creation helps me as I move forward.