Is it Passion or Craziness?

In the past couple of years, I have discovered something new in myself I never realized existed.
Buried way down deep, concealed beneath a thick layer of reality, parts of my brain have awakened and will no longer stay silent.

It's true what they say, a writer finds the possibility of a story everywhere. I've now noticed once the seed is planted, it grows until I am forced to let it out - by writing it down. If I don't, it's all consuming, occupying my mind at every waking moment, drifting into my dreams, waking me in the early morning hours while the world still sleeps, demanding an outlet. I still function, but in a hazy, dreamy sort of way while images play out in the back of my mind like a muted theater screen.

It won't be ignored, and I don't have the power to make it be still.

Once upon a time, I was too preoccupied to allow this imaginative side to emerge. I haven't yet figured out if it's a blessing or a curse.

I love a story, I love the characters, and I love the very aspect of creating fictitious lives and situations from nothing. But, when the story is finished, and an empty gap exists in the span of time before another idea solidifies, it is then my brain feels lost. It starts searching, determined to fill that vacant space with something.

This is when I feel it is the most true that writers must be a little 'mad', a tad bit 'bent', or a smidgen on the 'loopy' side. It's as if my brain demands a background program be running at all times. You know, the kind that won't allow you to shut down until it's finished?
That's me.
Is it passion, or pure craziness?
I haven't yet decided.


A quote from Charles Bukowski -

Don't do it.
Unless it comes out of you like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder.
Don't do it.
Unless the sun inside you is burning your gut.
Don't do it.
When it is truly time and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep doing it until you die or it dies in you -there is no other way, and there never was.