Vocational

Just reread a book that made a great impression on me when I first read it ten years ago, Alice Flaherty's The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain. Still very struck by these final lines:

The scientist asks how I can call my writing vocation and not addiction. I no longer see why I should have to make that distinction. I am addicted to breathing in the same way. I write because when I don't, it is suffocating. I write because something much larger than myself comes into me that suffuses the page, the world, with meaning. Although I constantly fear that what I am writing teeters at the edge of being false, this force that drives me cannot be anything but real, or nothing will ever be real for me again.