How Poetry Saved Alexander Schotten’s Life

It was snowing the first time Alexander read a poem he had written aloud…

He was in treatment then, a center made up of two old Victorian-style homes, planted in the middle of downtown. Outside, drug dealers moved through the alleyways like ghosts—lost souls, as he described them—meandering through a world that felt so close yet so far away. Sirens pierced the night, echoing the chaos in his mind, while inside, the creaking of stairs filled the air. Alexander often felt profoundly alone, even surrounded by the murmur of others. He spent nights stepping into the cold, lighting cigarette after cigarette, inhaling poison to survive the suffocating darkness.

To get to the group therapy center, he had to cross the street. It was winter in northern Wisconsin, and the small building where they met was barely heated. The old furnace would take half the session just to make the room livable, but that day, Alexander never stopped shivering. Partly, it was the cold—but mostly, it was fear. 

Not the reckless fear of using dangerous drugs or committing crimes to survive. This was a different kind of fear. It was raw, vulnerable, heart-gripping fear.

But he walked through it. For the first time in his recovery, Alexander chose to face it. He doesn’t remember much about the poem now—just that it had something to do with a mirror and the reflection he couldn’t bear to see. At the time, he thought it was Shakespearean-level genius, though he laughs about it now. What mattered wasn’t the words but the act of writing them and sharing them. It was the first time he allowed himself to be intentionally vulnerable and connected with others through art.

In the short term, that moment didn’t change his life. Alexander left treatment, relapsed, overdosed multiple times, and nearly didn’t survive. He threw away every opportunity to recover, until finally, prison became his reality.

Prison is where Alexander rediscovered poetry. It was also where he learned to count cards and gamble, an odd juxtaposition that still amuses him. In the early hours of the morning, while the institution slept and his cellmates dreamed of freedom, Alexander filled notebooks with his trauma. 

It became his secret, a small rebellion of self-expression in an environment so stuffed with pain that he says, “A single storm could have broken the dam.” Others in the prison who used art to cope taught him how to sharpen his craft. Through this, he began to gather the artistic tools that, one day, would help him paint a new path for himself on a canvas he never expected to find.

But again, this change didn’t happen overnight. After his release, Alexander didn’t touch a pen for four years. This time, he didn’t relapse—but recovery brought its own set of challenges. He traded drugs for alcohol and convinced himself he was doing fine because he wasn’t hitting rock bottom anymore. But deep down, he was stuck.

Where Things Began to Shift

After four years, Alexander finally picked up a pen again.

It wasn’t for poetry, not at first. The words were jagged, scattered—his mind was in pieces. But each sentence brought a new sense of clarity, and with that, a spark of something he hadn’t felt in a long time: hope.

He started carrying a notebook everywhere. Work, the bar, his car—it didn’t matter.

“I had to face myself on paper,” he would later say. “It was the only way I could hear my own voice over the noise of my past.”

Writing wasn’t just cathartic—it was his rebellion. Against the numbness. Against the mistakes. Against the years of silence. It was his way of reassembling the broken parts of himself.

When he finally started performing his poems, it wasn’t about getting applause. It was about being real. And the audience felt it. The vulnerability in his words spoke to them, and they responded. Alexander wasn’t the only one healing.

At a poetry slam one night, someone asked, “How did you make it out?”

He smiled softly. “I didn’t find peace. I found a pen. And with it, I found my voice.”

At that moment, it clicked.

Healing wasn’t about forgetting the past—it was about learning to live with it. Through poetry, Alexander had found a way to make his past a part of his story, not a weight holding him back.

For the first time in his life, he wasn’t just surviving. He was living—fully, authentically, at peace with his past and the person he had grown to be.

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