How Heath Ledger and Training to be a Poetry Therapist Saved My Life
I was depressed, lonely, and at a spiritual dead end in New York City when experiencing the actor’s death up close and learning how to help others heal set me on the path to emotional redemption
I lived in New York City in my mid-30s from 2006 until 2009. During that time, the man I believed to be the love of my life broke my heart, an abusive ex-boyfriend died at the age of 34, and I watched the NYC coroners’ department carry the body of movie star Heath Ledger down from his apartment in a body bag after his untimely death at the age of 28.
I was living in one of those shoe box apartments people think of when they think of experiencing urban single life on a limited budget. It was technically a one-bedroom, a third-floor walk-up in NoLIta one block from the remaining sliver of Little Italy that Chinatown hadn’t yet swallowed up.
The bedroom, however, had room enough only for a double bed; if I spread out my arms I could touch each wall. There was barely any light, it smelled of old cabbage, and I tried to brighten it up by painting one wall in each of its room a different color of paint. One friend once generously called it “miserable.”
I moved to New York in 2006 after the death of my mother and because the job I had as a technology journalist in San Francisco transferred me there, and most of my family lived nearby in suburban Philadelphia.
Although I was trying to make the most of city life by frequenting popular restaurants and nightspots with the smattering of friends I’d made, attending theater and cultural events, and having as much random sex as I could muster, I was, by mid-2007, even more miserable than my living quarters.
From the outside, my single and freewheeling nights in NYC might have appeared fun. However, I was pining for an on-and-off again ex-boyfriend — who dumped me with clear finality and cancelled upcoming travel plans we had in June 2007. That happened the same week the ex-boyfriend before him — an abusive alcoholic — finally drank himself to death at the age of 34.
Troubled Times
The last half of 2007 was a haze of booze, therapy, anxiety, tears and solitary evenings spent jogging over the Brooklyn Bridge and eating takeout tacos (one bonus of the shithole apartment was the best taqueria in NYC, La Esquina, was one block away).
Another bright light during this time was that in addition to my full-time job, I also was studying on weekends and other spare time to be what was then called a poetry therapist, a modality that has since come to encompass varied forms of using writing for therapeutic purposes.
The work I was doing — a combination of writing and psychology — was of course also extremely confronting. Like most therapists, learning about how to be one is a crash course in also dealing with one’s own trauma. If therapy is meant to gently pry open emotional wounds so we can cure them through a careful and safe process, studying to facilitate a therapeutic modality blows them apart like a shrapnel blast.
My experience of my course of study was no different. As part of my training, I took correspondence courses in psychology particularly geared toward those studying to help others use writing for therapeutic means. One of those involved writing essays every week about our own experiences with certain situations that might cause psychological stress or trauma.
I remember one exercise that particularly floored me. However, in doing so, it facilitated a massive breakthrough for my own work with my therapist, which — like every good New Yorker — I had acquired almost as soon as I touched down in the city.
I don’t remember what the specific exercise was, but I ended up writing about suffering physical abuse at the hands of the ex-boyfriend who had just recently died. Our relationship, which you can read about here, was stormy from the start, and I had anger issues of my own from a traumatic childhood that manifested in unpleasant ways during our time together.
Because of this, I had long believed that the times he had held me down on the ground with his hand over my mouth to stop my screaming, and the time he smacked me across the room — which resulted in a police visit and my bailing him out of jail for domestic abuse — were my fault.
I thought I had deserved to be physically restrained and struck because I had screamed too loudly or thrown and broken something — a glass or a picture frame — in response to his emotional and verbal abuse.
When I wrote that essay for that psychology course, a realization that it had not been my fault and that I could finally forgive myself for thinking it was so, hit me as hard as any blow he’d ever landed. I remember spending the evening in the bathtub (another bonus of that terrible apartment) shaking and crying, hugging myself and repeating over and over, “It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault.”
The Pathway to Healing
I didn’t quite know it then, but this powerful moment is when I finally started to heal not just from that abuse, but also years of trauma growing up in a family that didn’t quite understand me, and so blamed many of its dysfunctions on me.
The bathtub is also where I found myself on the day that Heath Ledger died. It was January 22, 2008 — which means that the 14th anniversary of the talented actor’s death is in 10 days. This may be what has me recalling this story so vividly today, as memory can indeed work in strange ways.
I had called in sick to work, but it was really for my mental, not physical health. I’d spent most of the day lying in the bathtub and in my bed reading Ann Patchett’s “Truth and Beauty” — a book about the author’s friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy, who suffered from a facial deformity — because it seemed a far more attractive way to spend the day than facing the outside world.
Toward the end of the afternoon, I checked the news online and saw that Heath Ledger was believed to have been found dead of a drug overdose inside his loft on Broome Street, which just happened to be about three blocks away from my apartment on Kenmare and Mulberry.
Like any good journalist, I decided to go to the scene, curiosity and restlessness having gotten the better of me. When I arrived, a small crowd of about 40 press, police and onlookers were gathered in the early winter cold. The mood was of course quite somber, and some fans were holding flowers and memorabilia of the actor.
Within a short time after my arrival, there was a flurry of police activity, and the door of the apartment building opened so two men could wheel out Ledger’s body in a black body on a gurney. Maybe it was because of the antidepressants I was on at the time, but I remember feeling simultaneously moved and umoved by the experience.
There was a part of me that knew — having been a fan of the actor’s performances, especially his poignant portrayal of a gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain — I should feel some type of sadness for a young talent and father lost so young. Indeed, his own daughter at the time was about the same age as the one left behind by my ex-boyfriend when he’d passed away.
But maybe it was my dispassionate journalistic mind, which was trained to look at events without sensitivity and as mere facts and figures, but on some level I felt nothing, as dead inside as poor Ledger’s body was on that gurney.
The crowd slowly began to disperse after that and, overcome by a sudden shame for even being there to witness such a tragedy, I, too, began the short walk back to my apartment.
It was only much later that I realized that seeing what had become of that beautiful yet clearly troubled young man affected me deeply, igniting within me a determination that no matter how desperately sad I felt, I would choose to live rather than choose to die.
Limping Toward Redemption
In the months that followed, I began clawing my way out of the hole I’d been in and limping toward my own redemption. I weaned myself off anti-depressant medication with the help of an eight-week mindfulness therapy course recommended by my therapist.
I started having more fun in the city. Not long after Ledger’s death I moved to Red Hook, Brooklyn, to a much bigger and better apartment in a close-knit neighborhood of artists. It introduced me to a whole new way of living in New York — the idea that each neighborhood was its own small village — that made me see the city with fresh eyes and gave me newfound appreciation for my life there.
I also traveled later that year to Portugal for the first time, a trip that would, unbeknownst to me, completely alter the course of my life. I moved abroad for good a little over a year later and the rest, as they say, is history.
Perhaps in a way I’m come full circle now, having completed the work I started in New York by launching my own therapeutic writing mentorship business, Mermaid Mentoring, to finally live what I believe is my life’s purpose.
My aim now is to spread the power of writing to help others heal, using my own rich and personal experience with emotional trauma and redemption to help other women who feel stuck, or who want to make a change but aren’t sure how, to transform their lives.
Without my sad and lonely time in New York City, and the unfortunate and untimely death of a beautiful and famous human taken from the world far too young, I would never have known how valuable it can be to reach the bottom only to rise again.