Complaining complaints and the complainer who complains them

I wrote this poem a while back when I was in a somewhat similar situation as I am in currently:

Writer Blocks
Waiting to be able to write is worse
Than a five year old on Christmas Eve,
Worse than nine months' gestation
To an elephantine mother.

Yes, it feels great when it leaves,
Like a virus expelled, or house guests―
Like a bladder held too long getting relief.
Though it feels great in the releasing,

It doesn't feel great in the holding.
Inability to write is holding glass in the hand,
Painful, bleeding, possibly damaging.
Holding anything in isn't recommended

(Nine out of ten Surgeons General say so),
Like breath or love or a story.
So that's what it becomes, then,
These mighty weights in the brain:

Blocks upon which a tale is written,
Cement stories, laid brick by brick,
Word by word, letter by letter,
Thought by thought. The writer

Isn't blocked, but blocks the writing.
Except in this case, when he sits
And types a free verse poem
And wishes he were better.

Isn't that the point of writing?
Of wanting? Of being passionate about?
Not dangling prepositions
(Like the one above)

But genuine reality, ratified by
Imagination―words loved and lived
By imagination? But writing is nowhere,
And yet it is everywhere and all things.

Not God, though writing can
Be as absent as He sometimes feels―
Which isn't fair to God,
But is fair to writing.

There isn't much that can
Be accomplished when you
Can't get past the rejection,
The tiny hiccups, the lack of good.

And thus he sits, hands
On keyboard, writing poetry
That has quatrains upon quatrains of words
And no thoughts new, nothing known,

Longing shown, daylight dying.
If this is the best he can do,
If this is all that his muse may muster―
Little wonder he hasn't made anything better.

There is definitely a refrain of self-loathing in it, but this was written less as a pity part and more of an indication of frank honesty. The lines that are most apt right now are these: " Not God, though writing can/Be as absent as He sometimes feels―/Which isn't fair to God,/But is fair to writing." Coupled with the idea of holding things in as being a painful thing, and it's recommended one not do that (nine out of ten Surgeons General say so) gets at the way that I'm feeling right now.

Admittedly, there has been a lot going on:

• Peter had his surgery, came home, went back, came home, all of which has thrown off my muse.
  
• I discovered that if there is a lot of clutter about the room in which I write, I can't get into the groove because I feel guilty that I haven't straightened up (and so I straighten up, which saps all my energy and then I lose the will to write).
  
• Peter is getting to be less and less demanding as his autonomy and typical three-year-old personality reassert themselves, but Jeremy has been fussier the last day or two, and his naps are now shorter than the effort it takes to put him to sleep.
  
• And Jeremy wakes up more readily when he hears me typing. Not playing video games, playing the guitar, or watching movies. No, he'll sleep through those fine. But when I start to type? Yeah, then he stirs and squirms and wakes up.
  
• Because of the hospital issues, everyone's sleep schedules are shocked--Gayle and I often don't go to bed until 1:30 in the morning, since there's so little time together. Peter's meds have to be administered at weird times, meaning he doesn't go to bed until after 11, sometimes 12.
  
• Despite the semblance of normalcy on the outside, the whole household is still in turmoil. Additionally, I've been fighting chronic headaches, something that probably comes from the stress of the last month, plus the incessant motorboat droning of Peter's air condenser that sits in the pantry, vibrating at just the right frequency to push my head into a tight coil.
  
• This has led to me taking a couple of pills pretty frequently to cut the pain, since I'm such a grouch when my head hurts. The reason I resist so frequently to medication is that I don't want to build up a dependency on chemicals in order to live my live. I hope that the pill taking is because of everything else, and not just body being lame.
  
• I can't seem, for the price of my sanity, to write the story that's building up in my feeble brain.
  

This last one is probably a bizarre statement to anyone who doesn't write, but there's almost a physical illness that accompanies my inability to write. It is excruciating during the school year when I only have four or five hours a week on Saturdays to write, and much of that time is spent in weekend classes or what-have-you. It is inexplicably worse during the summer when the time is there, staring at me, and the best I can do is put together a measly blog that sounds petulant rather than profound. (But venting always does that, so I suppose that the only difference is that the sentiments here will provide the sediment of the Internet, rather than being the wind of words that pass through the hearer and then fade.)

So that's where I am. I read an annotation by Brandon Sanderson about the dedication of his latest book, Warbreaker (which I believe I've mentioned before), that he used to daydream that the way he'd propose to his future wife would be to have the proposal as the dedication of one of his books. It never worked out that way, but one thing he mentioned was that both his teenage dreams--of being married and of being a published author--have come to pass. This struck me as incredibly wonderful. I am excited that a local author has gained such renown. But I do have a tinge of jealousy in me.

That's not quite right. Mostly, I'm not the jealous type. I don't begrudge others as a general principle. I don't buy into the idea of competition (I find it a diabolic manipulation of people's emotions, one of Satan's tools to deceive people into ignoring and using others). I don't want to 'beat out' anybody. I often don't play competitive video games (against friends or my wife) for the reason that if I feel good it means that the loser feels badly. That's a zero-sum game that I don't buy into.

So I don't view Sanderson's success as something that I dislike or necessarily wish I had (because, to be honest, I wouldn't want the kind of pressure that that man has. Finishing the Wheel of Time? No, thank you). Instead, I feel a type of jealousy that he is doing what I want to do, too. But, more than that, he actually is doing it. This isn't the publishing part of the equation, either. It's the creative side, the part of the industry that allures me. It's also the part that I can do, regardless of rejection letters or characters who should've been awesome but end up sucking hardcore (I'm looking at you, Chaleman).

I hope this post proves cathartic for me. Maybe that's what I needed to say, and the result will be a breaking of the dam.

But, odds are good, it's simply what is, taken for all in all.