“Hi, I’m John and I’m an addict.”

It’s taken me almost a decade to say those words. After years of self-denial, I’ve finally come clean. I sit in the circle with the rest of the addicts. Smoke curls through the air, but not from cigarettes; someone lit incense. It helps promote creativity, I was told. The writers listen patiently to my story. I tell them I tried to sleep, but my addiction called like a sweet muse, whispered in my ears as I pressed them into my pillows, until I got out of bed at last to satiate this demon.

I could have been promoted years ago, but I was just too tired from sleepless nights spent before the computer. My mind wasn’t as sharp as it should have been. Lack of sleep does that to a person. Oh, I had all the opportunities of sleep the next person had, but I gambled them away in the recesses of the night. My children slept. My wife slept.

I’m divorced now, but I still don’t sleep very well. I’m always writing. Although my writing wasn’t the main factor in the divorce, it contributed somewhat. And while I have full physical custody of three small children, I am still an addict.

It doesn’t matter what I write, either. I used to write philosophical essays, and before that it was metaphysical meanderings of my brain. From time to time I wrote short stories, almost all of it fiction, and there were the times I wrote about episodes of my life, but it didn’t really matter what I wrote… as long as I wrote.

I am philosophical by nature, and it is my philosophical side that has given a name to this addiction of mine: the expansion of expression. Humankind must express themselves, and for the writer this is crucial. I believe personal expression is paramount for psychological health. We’ve all read what the profilers say about those loners who buy a gun and shoot their fellow classmates, how those loners are not accepted by their peers, how they have no outlets to express themselves, and because of this they take their angst and rage out upon the very society that rejected them.

We, as a human species, have psychological needs. Sociologists tell us the need to belong, for acceptance, is one of the most important needs there is. However, I have the audacity to add to that. Perhaps it is my experience of being a writer, of knowing the addiction that writing is for writers, that compels me to put my foot in my mouth and say this, but mere acceptance isn’t enough. Not for the optimal psychological health of the individual. Acceptance is merely the beginning for personal satisfaction; expression is the conclusion of acceptance by one’s peers.

How many men landscape their yards? They do it to express their own style and taste. Women express themselves in their homes, interior decorating, choosing colors and textures and objects to express their personalities. Men use the yard and women use the home, but the end result is the same: they are expanding their expression.

I think a person is like a conduit of pipe, like a river. When he is able to connect to another body of water (acceptance), that is a good thing, but when he is able to let that water flow through him into the other body of water (expression), that is optimal for health. We all know what happens when rivers dam up. Devastating floods destroy life. Likewise, when those loners profilers have told us about are not able to connect to others and especially express themselves, they dam up their emotions and, like a flood, life is lost.

The writer is a little different from the rest of the population. Their inner river of expression doesn’t gently pass through them. The need to express this inner creativity is so great that mere social contact through friends and work isn’t enough. The writer is consumed with the expression of some idea or story or prose, and the river within rages and grows until the dam bursts. There is no holding back this river, for its always raining for the writer, and an inexhaustible sky of ideas constantly rains down filling the inner river of the writer.

The expansion of expression is a force, the pulse of life Nietzsche should have called Dionysian (but instead called Apollonian by mistake, in my mind). The philosopher said the Apollonian man reflected life through are like mirrors, and he said anything that wasn’t living was Apollonian. For example, a poem on a sheet of paper isn’t alive—it has no heartbeat, it doesn’t grow and consume and leave waste and mate. It reflects, like the moon, but because it merely reflects it is dead.

He said the Dionysian man used things that were alive such as dancing, drinking and revelry to express the pulse of life. Dancing is alive and so is singing.

I understand the difference between the Dionysian and the Apollonian man, but it is obvious to me that Nietzsche didn’t understand his own philosophy, for there are times when writing becomes so infused with the pulse of life that it becomes seethes with life itself. There are times when a short story doesn’t just reflect life, it burns with life, not like a mirror reflecting, but like a cauldron that boils over with ideas so contagious they infect all who read it.

Nietzsche was a writer, too. He was addicted to writing. He had ideas and thoughts, and he spent countless hours manifesting them. He didn’t care if the entire world—which was mostly religious then—castrated his career and excommunicated him from heaven (“You’re going to burn in hell, Nietzsche!”). He didn’t care because he felt the pulse of the river within, and that river needed an outlet, it needed bodies to fill.

For the normal person, the expression of themselves through landscaping and their homes is enough. Expressing themselves at work or church is enough. But for the writer, that is merely the beginning. It never stops raining for the writer: their inner river rises daily; their ideas and creativity never stops bleeding; and they are not satisfied until their words penetrate the minds of others, this need as cruel as war and addicting as opium.

The stories and poems of writers do not merely reflect life, as Nietzsche said (in my mind), they pulse with life. When a writer is consumed with an idea; when time slows to a crawl as he enters that trance-like state before the keyboard; when he looks up at the clock to find he has written a full two extra hours longer than he thought he had; when the words must be expressed at the cost of sleep, food and intimacy (eventually): there is nothing that can stop the words from spilling forth. It would be easier to stop life from growing or lava from flowing from an exploding volcano.

The need to write is an intense deep-felt hunger, intense with passion and vicious in its pursuit of self-expression, and like an out-of-control rage or unbridled passion, it must express itself. Flesh cannot stop it nor can discipline. The more the writer gives in to his craving, the greater it becomes, and the more people read his words, the stronger the addiction becomes.

The expansion of expression is a basic need for humans everywhere. It is not as basic as food and water and shelter, but as a psychological need it is important. If it wasn’t, men wouldn’t express themselves through their front lawns and women wouldn’t express themselves through home décor. The need for people to express themselves is so incredibly powerful that we now have online communities devoted entirely to diaries and journals and philosophies of the American People. If expressing oneself wasn’t a basic psychological need, such internet domains would die out. They are more than a fad because they meet the primary psychological need all humans have: expanding their boundaries of expression.

Perhaps there is a little writer within all of us, and the expansion of expression must be met through online journals and diaries and blogs, else the individual begins to feel suffocated by society as it weighs in and presses him down. For the writer, however, the need is more intense, and the copious amount of words produced isn’t by choice, it is by necessity. The writer burns within, and the burning continues until expressed, at which time the writer ignites himself in excitement and ignites others with his ideas and words.

Does every writer get published? No. Does every published writer make a living at writing? No. But the writer doesn’t stop because of lack of funds or fame; he continues until his dying breath because, in the end, it is the very breath he breathes.

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