Chapter 156

I’m sure you’ve heard of writer’s block before. It’s a common phrase — tossed around in movies, books, and social media — as though creativity itself sometimes hits a wall. I’m not sure I’ve earned the right to call myself a writer just because I’ve been documenting my own life, but if I have, then I suppose I’ve finally found my writer’s block. Unlike most writers, though, I’m welcoming it.

As I’ve mentioned before, this blog was written on and off, in bursts. Not all writing sessions were equal. On my worst days — when my thoughts were spiraling and my chest felt tight — I wrote the most. Writing was my outlet, my therapy, my confession booth, my survival strategy. It helped me calm down, it gave shape to chaos, and, in more ways than I ever expected, it saved me.

When the scam first came to light, I wrote endlessly. I wrote to survive. I wrote because silence felt unbearable. I wrote because my mind refused to rest. That first storm of entries carried me for weeks — maybe months. I didn’t notice time passing, only the rhythm of typing, rewriting, and rereading until, one day, I noticed something new.

It stopped.

I can’t pinpoint the exact chapter — maybe it was 142 — but I remember finishing a paragraph and realizing I had said everything there was to say. I had written every permutation of my grief, every metaphor for anger, every allegory for loss. My brain had explored the map of my own pain from every angle, and there were no new roads left to draw.

And then… I got bored.

That boredom wasn’t emptiness; it was peace sneaking in, disguised. The mind, I’ve learned, gets tired of its own demons. Even my anxiety — that relentless shadow — eventually grew dull. I’d rehearsed the hurt so many times that even my inner chaos started yawning. That’s when healing began: not in a sudden revelation, but in quiet fatigue. Time had done what no apology or plan could — it had made even suffering mundane.

There’s a strange comfort in that. When our demons grow boring, they stop being dangerous. The mind craves novelty, and darkness loses its grip once it becomes familiar. When the storm quiets, what’s left isn’t joy, exactly — it’s stillness. And from that stillness, I found something new: the ability to simply be. To let the present moment, with all its imperfections, feel enough.

A mentor once told me, “We are not entitled to anything in life.” It sounded profound at the time — maybe even wise — but also incomplete. After everything that’s happened, I think I finally understand what they were getting at. We’re not born deserving anything — not love, not happiness, but also not suffering. We enter this world with no guarantees, and everything after that is borrowed time.

If I think about it that way, then maybe control — the thing I’ve clung to my whole life — was never really mine to begin with. My internal locus, the same force that kept me alive through all this, also kept me from resting. Maybe peace isn’t found by taking control, but by loosening it — by letting the world happen without needing to command every detail.

None of this means the past disappears. The scars are still here — some from family, some from failure, some from love. But scars don’t just mark damage; they mark survival. My inheritance wasn’t money, or stability, or even wisdom — it was endurance. It was learning how to stand up, keep moving, and find constants where chaos used to live.

For me, those constants still remain: the familiar calm of classical music, the quiet weight of my wedding ring, the recurring comfort of time itself. These things haven’t changed, and in their stillness, I can finally see how much I have.

If there’s a lesson at the end of all this — and maybe there doesn’t need to be — it’s that we’re all just walking through time one second at a time, doing the best we can. We don’t deserve or not deserve the things that happen to us. They just… happen. And that’s okay.

Maybe that’s what writer’s block really is — not the absence of words, but the absence of chaos. Maybe when the story starts to settle, silence becomes enough.

And maybe, finally, that means I’ve written my way to peace.