No mad characters

The book I am currently reading has a character that is a writer.  He is a reserved type of person and I came to a part of the book where he is asked what he does for a living.  He regretted having to say that he was a writer.  He thought that it always came off as if he was showing off and the other thing was that it always seemed to make for a dead-end conversation.  It had the inevitable path of where he was asked, Really? Writer?  Where do you get your ideas?  People thought it was glamorous except the character knew it was anything but that.  What could be glamorous about sitting alone in a room all day, trying not to go mad?
I certainly grinned at that.  I can certainly understand where he might be coming from.  My only problem (not that it will be a problem since I will never have to say I write for a living – wouldn’t that be glamorous!) is that I am already beyond trying not to go mad.  The madness is already here to stay and there was little to no trying about it.
I had someone ask me the other day if an incident had freaked me out.  My reply was that I have long lived in an almost constant state of freak-out.  I may not always be obvious about it, I may cover it very well, but let’s face it, I have some sort of underlying freakish way about how I might interrupt some ideas.  Even though I realize that, you may not see me waving the white flag of surrender (make that never) but I may retreat for a while and you’ll never know where I’ve gone or why.  Most likely it will be back to sitting alone in my room all day, trying not to go mad, writing, and trying to figure out why I got freaked out.
It’s not really such a bad thing.  I will find something creative to do to calm the freak-outs every time.  I’ve done it a long time in different forms.  Writing is just one way for me like reading is another.  And if you don’t think my reading can be creative then you don’t understand that every book I come across has something I use or store away or learn from to use later.
Hmm, maybe that is why the recent books I’ve read seemed too long and less relaxing.  I’ve come to use a lot of the fiction I read as research and text books.  No wonder they are putting me to sleep!  I never liked school and just to make it worse, this is self-inflicted instruction wrapped in fictional ideas.  I've got to pick some better books.  Maybe I need to pick books that don't have writers as characters or at least ones without characters that are trying not to go mad. 
TT