As much as I used to *love* writing as a child, as an adult, it seems like I just can't do it now. It isn't that I don't want to, or that I don't have any ideas. I have a million ideas, and I *think* about writing all the time; but the minute I go to actually *do* it, my brain freezes. The thing is, I'm scared to write.
Why am I scared? I lived with my parents until I was 23, and my parents didn't believe in privacy for their children. Diaries, journals, letters, poems, lists, homework assignments - all were fair game. If my parents didn't like what I wrote for *any* reason, an argument ensued. As a child, I didn't think about what I was writing, or why I was writing it; I just wrote. But my parents didn't believe that. They believed I was writing to make them look bad. Half the stuff I wrote wasn't even about them; it was fictional stuff. Yes, some of it might have been based on them, but there is a difference. It didn't matter. Once they (with emphasis on my mom) had it in their heads that I was writing something bad, especially if they thought it was about them, I got in trouble.
This didn't just happen when I was a child. I wrote poems, stories, and letters to friends as an adult; if my parents read them (if I accidentally left something out in the open), and didn't like what I'd written, I got yelled at. Not just "hey, don't write this stuff," but long, loud yelling.
Any time I start to write now, I begin thinking that I'm writing is something that could get me in trouble with my parents. I'm 40 years old and worried about getting in trouble with my parents! How dumb is that? I know it's dumb. But it's how I feel.
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