So It Begins: From the Formless and Empty

Recently I've begun to come to terms with the idea that I am an artist.
Now, before I got too far on this high and mighty quest you've probably envisioned for the "artist," a disclaimer: I use artist in the simplest sense of which I can think.
The artist I "am becoming" is not at all a reference to my ability to write, paint, sculpt, or photograph. It is not about how amazing I am with craft, or how terrible.
When I say artist, I mean a way of living. An artist sees the world differently than others. They see beauty and connections where others see ugliness and chaos. They see something profound in something simple.
But perhaps the most important, isolating, and egotistical aspect of being an artist is the suffocating desire to create something.
An artist cannot escape their craft. If they run from it they find little happiness anywhere else. It is like how Christians speak of God's calling. There is a tugging of one's heartstrings that cannot be ignored. You are called to your craft because you feel little joy anywhere else. When you write the words on the page that just seem to fit together, all the demons of your life just seem to fade away. Everything will be fine if your craft is perfected. If the paint is applied the exact way you envision it, if the coal defines the lines you never knew could be seen then the nightmares will stop; the doubts will be silenced.
You must write because you cannot do anything else.
I want to be anything but a writer some days. I want to be a nurse, a banker, a marine biologist, an astronaut. I want to find happiness in something that doesn't simultaneously cause me so much pain. I want to find joy in helping others, not in attempting to define the cosmos with words. I want to find happiness in the interaction with others, not the movement of a comma, the rearrangement of a paragraph.
But the artist cannot do these things. An artist doing anything but art is an artist living unfulfilled. You've met them before. The old man in the bookstore who stares painfully at the pages of the contemporary art journal. The glassy eyed cashier at the supermarket. The teacher with the breaking heart as she reads the creative words of the students.
These people, for hundreds of different reason I will not deface with guesses, ran away from the call to be artists. They fled like birds before a storm. They flew away from the hurricane of art.
And sometimes, I wish I could flee too; and it's terrifying.