Writing what's painful

I got an article from one of the writing pages to which I'm subscribed entitled "Don't Avoid Painful Writing". http://goinswriter.com/painful-writing/

Usually I love stuff like this. Challenge writing forces me to do some really cool stuff out of my comfort zone. I discovered that I can write really good erotica during a challenge, to my surprise, but not without checking over my shoulder to make sure no one was watching me write!

But today I considered writing a Father's Day post for my dad, Tom, who died in 1997 of lung cancer. As I thought about it, my mind did circles around it, probing that wound and discovering to my surprise that it's still almost too painful to write about it, even now.

I guess I'm not ready to completely bare my soul as a writer yet, or to deal with that painful aspect. More specifically, I'm not ready to deal with the emotional aftermath of writing it. I don't know if that's good or bad. As a nurse, I often put away emotional aspects of my job to deal with later when it's 'convenient'. It makes me wonder how much I unconsciously put away, and how much it might be crippling me as a writer and as a person. Hmmm. Going to have to think about that one a long time, but it's going to have to be done.

Just more proof of the power of introspective writing. A writer who can create a fantasy world runs away from writing something real.

That's going to have to be an exercise for a later day.