A friend of mine, who is an actor and director, tells a story about when he first learned that theatre didn’t love him. Seems that he was hung over at 9 am, putting on makeup for a morning performance of a children’s show when he discovered this truth. Some time after he learned that, he tried to leave theatre, only to come back, a pattern which he repeated at least two more times.

Imogen West-Knights talks about giving up on her dream of acting in a Guardian article, “Why I Quit Acting.” Theatre didn’t love her either. The stories go on and on about those who gave their all to theatre and got very little, if anything in return. Even those who succeed in the eyes of the world find themselves dissatisfied with performance; just google “quit acting.”

And it’s not just theatre. None of the arts love us, regardless of whether it’s photography or painting or sculpture or dance or poetry. They demand our allegiance; they exert an influence over our lives and relationships, but they give very little back, particularly in terms of worldly success. The most we can expect is the bit of joy we get from the creative process. And that is often laced with anguish. We spend hours, sometimes days or weeks—or even months and years trying to create, and the return: acknowledgement of the artifact, but very little for the pain involved in its creation. It’s a very lopsided relationship that we have with our art.

Yet those of us who don’t quit continue to do it. Even those who quit one art, such as Ms. West-Knights, pick up another. It’s because those of us who are addicted to art have a strong urge to create, to tell stories, to invent, to make. So completely quitting everything creative is difficult for us, if not impossible. And even though some individuals succeed, for many, it’s a sad life. There are many articles connecting sadness or depression and creativity. But we still keep doing it.

And we continue to do it, in one form or another. And we all have the satisfactions that come from creating as well as the attendant pain. We do it because we must, because we are driven to create regardless of the toll it might take on other aspects of our life.

Not that there are not rewards. There are, although for most of us they are small. We sell a piece here; we get a good critique there. And all the while we get to create, and that’s the bottom line for most of us: satisfying the urge to create. So we continue to act and direct and photograph and paint and sculpt and dance and write because, for us, there is no other way to feed our addiction to creation.

And the fact that our chosen art does not love us does not deter us. We persist, not because we think that we are going to “make it big,” not because we think we will become famous, but because we must. We seem to have been born with an imperative to make things, to tell stories, to create. And so we continue to actively demonstrate our love for our art, unreciprocated though it is.