Short story - I tried using a metaphor to explore psychological abuse

[Oscen]

I want to do more creative writing; I have written bits and pieces over the years - poetry, song lyrics, and comedy routines.
However, I've never really sat down and written a longer piece of prose, like a short story, novel or screenplay, and am interested in trying these out as I just love losing myself in stories.

I started writing a short story about a girl who was guided by three spirits (members of her family) to start exploring her family's past by finding different, tiny doors in her house that let her peek into past memories that happened in those rooms. When she looked back on these memories, they looked different, like a nightmare world. She saw that her house was not the pretty, clean place she imagined, but dirty and dilapidated, the food was rotting, and her family were like hunched spiders and insects. When they spoke to each other, they spun webs over each other's faces and bodies, until she saw her own eyes were completely obscured and her body bound up in a web that restricted her from moving. Then her real life started to converge with the nightmare world. She started to pull webbing from her eyes when she woke in the morning and cough phlegm from her lungs. Meanwhile, her mother, the spider, started to suspect, and heightened her aggression. It's all a bit cheesy and on the nose, but I enjoyed toying with the concept as a representation of my childhood.

One unexpected thing was that I started to feel genuinely afraid while I was writing. I never actually feel afraid when I read books, and rarely feel afraid of horror movies, just tense and get startled by the jump scares. However, when I wrote this story I felt a rising sense of fear and kept looking over my shoulder, afraid my partner would see what I was writing... it was not him I was afraid of, just felt that I was wrong to be sharing these words with the world. In the end, I think it was somewhat cathartic, and helped me see my reluctance to create things and put them out into the world isn't just laziness alone.

[RiverRabbit]

Way to put your boot on the neck of that inner critic and write anyway.

[bluepalm]

Dear Oscen, may I gently disagree with you? What you write is not at all 'cheesy and on the nose'. It's very effective and has a ring of truth. The metaphor of spiders and a spider web is powerful for me. My husband used to appear in my dreams as a black spider and I have never forgotten the urgency and pain of a nightmare I had decades ago where I was hunched over, bent double, staring at the carpet, immobilised just inside the front door of the home I shared with him, unable to escape out the door, his thick web like iron bars across my back.

I do know that writing like you are doing can bring back the  sensations experienced so long ago and that can be scary. Based on my experience, I would suggest it's probably not laziness keeping you from writing - it's understandable apprehension. However, I'm utterly convinced that creating, writing, drawing is the key to releasing and freeing me from the web I was caught in for so long - and I love your image of pulling webbing from eyes.  So, I would encourage you to keep writing - write anything, let it flow. I echo River Rabbit: 'put your boot on the neck of that inner critic and write anyway'. I'm sure that ultimately your mind, body and soul will be grateful. That anyway is, and has been, my experience.

[Oscen]

Thank you for your support, guys.

I like that expression "to put my boot on the neck of my inner critic", RiverRabbit. It's had its boot on my neck for so long now; time to change places!

Thank you for your gentle disagreement, bluepalm - it makes me realise that that is still my inner critic, telling me that I must put down my own work so as to not sound too proud or boastful. I have a bad habit of doing this with all my creative endeavours.

Your dream sounds really scary. I hope you are free from this man's painful influence. I agree, spiders and spiders' webs are very powerful images. I like spiders, but when you think of them sitting in the middle of a web, and paralysing and bundling up their prey, ready to feed off later... it's a pretty good analogy for narc behaviour!

I didn't realise how paralysed I was, nor how creativity can stir up and release these emotions. I will do my best to keep going.