The Writing Question

I am always being asked to consider the question: "Why do we write?"
It is a conjecture I do not find easy to solve although I know I love to write. It is almost impossible to explain my love for writing. Ideas simply enter my head, one after the other and jostle in my mind like people in a crowd. The side effects of this are nausea, insomnia and a mind that will not let go of painful memories.
I find the insomnia part of it terribly irritating. It is far from uncommon for me to be writing at four am while my flatmates have just arrived back from a night out. Many writers I admire have suffered insomnia: Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling and Vladimir Nabokov were all raging insomniacs to name but a few. Dickens often walked late at night, which he described in his essay "Night Walks," and Kipling often wrote late into the night, in the same fashion as I sometimes do.
However, despite the trouble it gives me, despite the insomnia, the painful memories and the infuriating sensation I experience when I am inspired and do not have a notebook to hand, I love writing. I am a true Paramour of Prose. I love the physical sensation of the blood throbbing through my writing hand. I love the sheer freedom of writing. When I write, I do not feel I have to follow the conventions of speech. If I had to say the words I write, I would choke on them, but it's so easy to put those very same words down on a page. I also love the fact that writing acts as an outlet for all the ideas that enter my head and scream in my ears until I want to cry "Enough!"
I cannot give up my writing. Without my poems, short stories and my novelettes, I am nothing. They are me and I am them. Without them I do not exist.