Blocked

He stared at the screen for a long time, deliberately thinking of nothing, and not even its brilliant glow sparked anything good. It wasn’t writer’s block. There were plenty of ideas pouring into his mind, but all of them were dark and morbid and had no place in either his head or in the book. He wanted brighter things to write about, not the stuff that currently muddied his thoughts. And he only had the in-laws to blame for it.

It was bad enough before, when it was just his own low self-esteem trying to drag him down, and it got worse after their visit. But it wasn’t their fault. Not really. They were unimaginative people, and it wasn’t meant as an insult. They simply didn’t understand what drove him to decide to retire early, or why after thirty years in the workforce, working sixty hours and more a week for a scant salary, he would forsake that existence to follow a life-long dream. He knew they meant well, at least in their minds. They simply believed that if you weren’t making the biggest paycheck possible every other week no matter how many hours of the day you needed to sacrifice to the god of money, then you weren’t really working, and that if you weren’t commuting daily to a workplace, you were unemployed. They were the sort who considered homelessness and poverty as choices that people make and were terrified that their daughter would become one or the other because he was causing an “untenable financial drain.” They didn’t understand that he had already built a nice cushion that would sustain them until and if he sold a book, or until his retirement kicked in, whichever came first, although he was so late in life that the latter was most probable. And they wouldn’t understand the loathing he had developed for working those ten to fifteen hours a day for poverty wages for people that were ungrateful for his dedication and yet had come to expect it of him. And they certainly wouldn’t understand the contempt he held for anything short of his immediate family if it took him away from the one thing keeping him sane.

Still, their little talk was both juvenile and condescending. The mother-in-law had already coerced her husband well before their arrival to give him the “When I was younger, I worked ten jobs” speech, and she launched into the “unsustainable” lecture, both completely forgetting the decades of dedication he’d put into their version of the work ethic and dismissing any feelings he had for the subject. And forgetting that they were speaking to a grown-up who had already done a lot of soul-searching before making his decision. But he’d been polite, had bitten his tongue, had listened to them, and then civilly told them that he would consider their advice before reminding them that any decision made was his and his alone. And it had worked to maintain any remaining goodwill between them although he could tell they didn’t appreciate his answer.

He knew what would happen after they left, and sure enough he was right. Their own daughter, a victim to their expectations since birth, fell into her usual after-visit spiral, and he had to endure days of complaints about her mother’s meddling. As usual, his wife internalized it all, considered it her fault that they didn’t trust her with her own finances, and it took everything he had to stabilize her again. In concentrating on his wife’s needs, he wrote little to nothing that was good or acceptable while he worried about her state of mind when she was at work. Luckily, her mother had refrained from the usual harassing phone calls that only served to prolong her struggle.

But this time there was an aftereffect of their visit that had nothing to do with his wife. The mother-in-law’s words had become lodged in his head and there was no one to help him deal with them, no one he could talk to about it. He already knew what would happen if he said anything to his wife or even mentioned a hint of his own discontent with her parents. It would send her into a deeper, darker spiral that would take him days to settle, so once more, he bit his tongue and kept everything to himself. It was better to deal with the demons alone. He’d done it before, and he would do it again.

But ever since that day, the dark thoughts that he’d managed to keep at bay had moved out of the shadows and into the open. They invaded his usual writing, his usual thoughts, and had twisted the book into something dark and unrecognizable. He had to delete pages of writing and hours of work to purge them from his book, and in the end, it left him empty of any ideas other than the unsavory kind.

It was mostly his mother-in-law’s fault. His father-in-law was more laid back and accepting, and the mother more controlling. She had poisoned his mind like she had her daughter’s and nurtured the nagging doubts and self-sabotage that were always present, always making him second-guess himself, telling him that nothing he did would ever be good enough for publication or for anyone to see. He’d had those same awful doubts way before her visit, and he would have them well after she was gone, and they didn’t need her help in any way. In short, he resented her for it. He didn’t need any help tearing himself down. He’d gotten quite good at it already.

But he couldn’t really blame them. They were unimaginative people that couldn’t believe anyone could live any way other than their own. Theirs was a good life. They had money and had friends with money, and still wanted to put in a couple of hours at their fun jobs every week despite their age. But they didn’t have a creative bone in their collective bodies. They didn’t understand the need to create anything other than wealth, or the need for creativity for creativity’s sake, and they wouldn’t understand his need to leave a mark on the world that lasted after he had passed. They wouldn’t understand that leaving the legacy of his children wasn’t quite enough for him, nor would they understand the decades-long sacrifice he had already made of his dreams or that now, before he died, he wanted to author that novel, even if it were already too late for him.

So, he told her that he would consider her advice, and later his wife told him to not listen to her mother and just keep doing what he was doing, but the damage was done. The negative feelings were in full bloom, and their aroma tainted everything he wrote. So, after erasing his third or fourth attempt that night, he found himself staring at a bright screen that did nothing to lighten his mood. If anything, it made things worse. With all that potential right in front of him, with the ability to make of the words anything that he imagined, knowing how he wanted to take the story but blocking himself from writing because of the maelstrom of bad feelings that his mother-in-law had stirred up, he was afraid to type anything at all lest it come out dismally and unpalatable, so he just sat on his kitchen table chair at the desk he’d bought for his wife decades ago, which she had rejected, by the way, and stared at the flashing line, trying to not think at all.

But it was useless and only encouraged the darkness, so eventually he closed the document and sighed heavily. Writing wasn’t just a dream or a calling. It was therapy, the place where he could express everything that was bothering him through his characters and their exploits. Without it, like on days when he was unable to write for one reason or another, he grew edgy, tense, touchy. He knew it, of course, but he couldn’t help it. And his wife understood it in that unsaid way that spouses have and gave him the space that he needed until a bout of writing cheered him up again. Now, he couldn’t have any much-needed therapy until he exorcised his demons, but he couldn’t exorcise his demons without writing about them.

And he couldn’t sully the book with them. He didn’t dare. But then, he realized he hadn’t written for the website in a while. It was a place where he could allow his creativity to roam freely, even though most of the stuff he posted wasn’t of the greatest quality. Mostly, the stories there were quick thoughts or half-baked ones, but they were always fun to do, and it had been a long time since he’d posted anything. It was time to correct that neglect.

He opened the browser and logged onto the site, and by the time he’d clicked the button to create added content, he knew what he wanted to write about. But it took a while to figure out where to begin, and then he started typing.

“He stared at the screen for a long time, deliberately thinking of nothing, and not even its brilliant glow sparked anything good. It wasn’t writer’s block. There were plenty of ideas pouring into his mind, but all of them were dark and morbid…”

The End