I’ve written while sick, I’ve written while tired, I’ve written when very nearly dead. My first day at home, after giving birth to number one son — and almost dying, and having emergency caeserean — I had a short story idea. So I strapped the baby onto a sling and — because I was higher than a kite on morphine — crawled up the hallway to my office. It took me almost ten hours to type in that short story, but it was the first thing I sold. In fact, I sold it 8 times before I sold anything else.

But the thing is: We know we do it. But why do we do it?

Looking back, I swear I raised the kids in between books, short stories, submissions, rejections, edits–

I’m not sure it was what I should have done, but it might have been the only way I cold do it. Write. Or raise kids. Or yes.

Because why we write — or perhaps why I write, who knows? For all I know other people are different, though not those I’ve talked to — is an essential part of me, a thing I can’t stop and still be okay.

Why do I write? I don’t know. Why do birds build nests, and cats chase string?

What I do know is that if I stop writing, things go awry. Even if I stopped writing to deal with immediate life-pressures, like during moving.

Once I had a very bad ear infection and didn’t know it. Yes, this is germane, trust me. Anyway, I often have symptomless ear infections, till they burst forth with excruciating pain when it’s already very advanced. This one hadn’t hit that point, but it was very bad. I didn’t realize I’d lost my sense of balance/vertical and was walking around tilted a bit off vertical, until someone asked me why I was doing that, and my SIL who is an MD looked at me and said “You have an ear infection.” (Later I used this symptom to diagnose when my toddler son, who also had painless ear infections till they hit screaming pain suddenly, had an ear infection.)

When I stop writing, it’s like that. I don’t realize it from the inside, but I start slowly tilting off normal and rational, however you describe it (mostly being-able-to-appear-close-to-average and rational) until I’m completely out there, but I still don’t realize it.

Part of it is the need to create is still there, only it starts extending to more and more elaborate tasks I’m not suited to, whether it’s resurfacing a bathroom in novel materials or creating the world’s most complex and definitely weird six course meal. And they all feel absolutely necessary and I can’t be turned from them.

They are necessary, of course, but not to the world. Or to accomplishing whatever I need to that day. They’re necessary to my internal balance.

The least harmful thing I ever got into when I absolutely couldn’t write (and that was because of illness) is art. And even that means that I own more art paper than I’ll ever use, and well… the markers have now dried.

But more importantly, while I realize that there are other people whose creative obsessions run to construction or cooking or art, and that’s natural to them — tbf art is a little bit natural to me. I just like stories more, and am more obsessive about it — writing is my need. It’s what I am, at some deep level.

Why? I don’t know. Call it a vocation, or the random aligning of a weird, genetic slot machine. It just is how I’m put together.

Now, at times it is a great trial. And of course, I do feel guilty that while the boys were growing up I spent so much time writing or editing or crafting the next story.

But they seem to be okay for values of okay. Even if they both have their own creative drive. And, think on it, devoting your whole time to watching the kids was not normal for most of history, and might not be desirable at all.

So, if you’re a weirdo who needs to write — or do art, or resurface bathrooms, or sew, or recreate pre-historic weaving methods — do it.

Look you, it’s cheaper than psychiatry, might be more effective, and if you do it right, whether it’s novels or a channel on youtube about how to weave pre-historically, it might pay for itself and enrich your life and the lives of those around you.

So if you need to create? Do it. It’s not a sinful indulgence. It’s who you are.

Birds got to fly, fish got to swim, and you got to write stories.

Go do it.