It has been one of those days of struggle for me; not in any physical sense, but in terms of creativity. I have hit a very difficult section in the short story I am writing and I am not sure how to go about it. Yes I got 800 words written, but they were 800 words of betrayal, a very hard subject for me to face, I do know many forms of it so well after all.

Making it more difficult was the particular betrayal. In the story a mentally immature man is forced to face the fact that who he thought was his mother was nothing more than a lie. You see, I was adopted, but I knew I was adopted all my life. So now I have to face a situation where “what would I have done if I never knew I was adopted and then found out later in life that the person I called mother was not really my mother.” How would I have reacted?

This is not as easy as you may think. Certainly my life would change at that moment. All the lifelong beliefs I had concerning this person would change. Certainly I may have a violent reaction because of the betrayal that would seemingly be there. A lifetime of lies would be suddenly revealed, how would you react?

Would I lash out? Would I crawl into a hole? Would I accept it calmly? Would I deny it all and insist that I was being lied to now and blindly believe what was before was the truth? What if I found out about it by chance? What if I found out about it after my adoptive mother died? How would I react?

So I am at this impasse, I can’t continue with the writing until I have worked out this issue for myself. And I do have to work it out for myself. After all, writing is nothing more than a reflection of the authors life and perceptions. This is why reading an author is such a good look into who he is. His writing reflects his reactions to situations that you may never see in real life. Isn’t it true that when we all interact that we wear our masks, and it is a rare thing to know someone face to face without a mask or two getting in the way?

But when an author writes, the masks slip. It is a hard task for a writer to write with a mask on, it is so limiting. I guess that is one reason that blogging can be so personal, the masks are stripped away and you see us bloggers as we are, raw and sometimes devoid of our facades.

So I sit here, the blank page as large as life in front of me waiting to be besmirched by my words of searching and understanding. It may be a while.