Writer's Block or a Public Health Warning?

For the last few weeks, I have been writing these WWs on the day as I have had difficulty coming up with a new theme in advance. Today is no different. Finding a topic to work through, that hasn’t been done before, or isn’t unpalatable is becoming increasingly difficult. Patsy asked me last night if I have ‘writer’s block’. My reply was that there are plenty of things that I ‘need’ to write about to unload, and think about how I feel. But I can’t. For many of them, I have covered them before, and although things have moved on, they haven’t moved on far enough for me to make it interesting or relevant for everyone else. It doesn’t matter that I still need to unload around these subjects. What I don’t want though, is readers sitting there thinking “There he goes, banging on about loneliness and isolation again”, and then the reach of the posts starts to dwindle. From my perspective, seeing the number of visits to this site has a positive impact on me. It proves that I have worth. At the end of the day, the posts don’t just serve to give me the opportunity to unload, and explore what’s happening inside my head, but they are also there to give other bereaved parents the chance to understand that they aren’t alone and others feel the same way that they do.

In terms of what is palatable to a wider, non-bereaved audience, I am butting up against the hard core of topics that would have a place in a book, but I’m not sure about writing them down here. Ironically, these are the topics that I need to explore the most. The ones that deal with the darkest depths of the pain. There are various reasons for not covering them here; the audience is wider than just the bereaved parent community, the impact they will have on those that I love, and the subject matter itself that scares the sh*t out of me. The internal conflict is huge. For some of the subjects, I need to explore them but am terrified of what I will find if I do. Is ignorance bliss? I can work through the logic of it all, but emotions aren’t logical. And there’s a strange attraction to those dark places, one that is hard to ignore. There’s another problem too. It would open up the darkest places of my soul to public view, and that world is so alien to most that it will serve to push the few friends that I have left away. It will scare them as much as it scares me.

In time, I may come up with a solution to this dilemma and either make the decision to park it forever, or just crack on and deal with it. Last autumn, I started a second book, aimed at being a self-help guide for the newly bereaved, combining the thoughts of two dozen other bereaved parents. It was supposed to offer insights into this world of ours that weren’t just mine. But I’ve shelved it because it wasn’t giving me what I needed; the forum of honesty. I ran the risk of pouring my own feelings into it at the expense of everyone else. I had thought about writing the second book to reflect how I am feeling now, but it is probably going to end up being ‘more of the same’, and few would want to buy it and read it. One of the biggest benefits of the first book was that my feelings were out there for all to see and read. It was incredibly cathartic. It was also a prayer, one that asked for others to understand what my new world feels like, and get a glimpse into the rage that I live with every day. I could write a second book, but not publish it, but then the true benefit to me would be lost.

I know that I’m not ignoring those darker topics because I’m thinking about them all the time. I’m frightened of the response I’ll get if I put them out there. I’m also not entirely certain that this blog is the right place to explore them. Counselling is incredibly helpful, but writing here gives me a very different resolution to those troubling issues. Finally, whatever I write, won’t just impact on me, but on my family too. The TCF community will understand what I am writing and why, but the muggles almost certainly won’t. Maybe I should write them with a public health warning?