The future...

I'm reading The Hours by Michael Cunningham for the third time. I really like it, and the way he made it quite a bit like Virginia Woolf's writing. He's a really good author. I also bought another book by him, A Home at the End of the World. But it's third on my list, because I also have to read Eva Luna by Isabelle Aliende (I think I massacred her last name, oh well), and another book by her. I read House of the Spirits a while ago and really liked it. Oh and I also need to get around to reading A Separate Peace, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Atlas Shrugged, and fifty trillion other books. Well there's so many books I need to read, all the books in the world, so I won't try to list them.
I'm not sure why exactly I love reading and writing so much. Maybe because it's like going to another world, and I've never really felt like I belong in the world people say I should belong in. I guess inside of me seems so much more real. And I get really lost within myself. For being 5'1.5" and 107 pounds, there sure are amazingly, infinitely vast places inside of me. Plenty of room to get lost in, and never find my way back out. But that's okay with me. I understand myself and my world.
I have a vague fear that I will end up like many intellectual artists do who get lost inside themselves... burn out, and grow incredibly depressed. Although it is possible to aesthetically utilize that depression, it just hurts all the more in the end. I cannot possibly compare myself to such artists as Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Pablo Picasso, Van Gough, etc., but I can fear their lives and their fates.
And I do fear it all, all of it, the bipolar and other mental stuff, the intellect, the disconnection, the perfectionism, the personality of an over-achiever. I don't mind admitting to the fear. I sat in my car today, at the mall, and asked myself, "Do I really want to live my life like this? Going and going and going and never taking a break, never letting myself be bored or be still?"
No. I don't. But it doesn't seem to matter what I want, whether innate or developed, whether by nature or by nurture, I am an extreme perfectionist and I find comfort in the structure and order that paranoia provides.