My fellow traveler Randall Damon has been reading George Orwell again. Damned if that Orwell doesn't say some true things. Here's what he says, in an essay titled "Why I Write," about what separates Other People from writers:

The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish.
After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being
individuals at all—and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under
drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are
determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this
class.

The truth is, I have never been able to imagine how anyone endures pain without the promise of expressing it in writing, and I've never known what good is joy if there's no chance to get it across to others.

I see non-writers the same way some men see women: As a riddle I can't (quite) solve, but not through a lack of trying.

Boots readers, you're mostly writers: Can you imagine your life organized around anything else?