On Writing Your Pain

I guess it's pretty clear from reading this journal/blog that I am still struggling with the grief two years after my dad passed away. I wonder sometimes if bringing it up over and over again is making it harder for me to get over it rather than helping me.

Last night, I finally wrote the story I have been trying to write for a year. It's more true and real than any other story I have ever written, and I had hoped that it would be like a psychic lancet, releasing some of the things that have built up. I cried a lot, at the keyboard, while I wrote it, but I told myself that it was a good thing, to write it. That it was part of my healing, or whatever.

I finished it. My wife read it. She cried too. Said it was good. It would be hard to tell me that it was anything else, I guess. I am pretty sure it's good, maybe the best thing I have written yet.

But I don't feel the relief I had hoped. In fact, I had bad dreams all night, by which, I mean, dreams in which I see my Dad, and talk to him, and then I realize that he is dead and this isn't real, and I start crying in my sleep. Not fun dreams, and not the kind of dreams I would expect to have if I was getting better. So. It's probably too early to say what effect it will have on me. I'll just have to wait and see.