Kafka's Monster, and Mine

In 1922, Kafka turned down an invitation from his friend Oskar Baum to spend his holidays with him, and used the occasion to write to Max Brod:

“It is a fear of change, a fear of attracting the attention of the gods by what is a major act for a person of my sort.

“Last night, as I lay sleepless and let everything veer back and forth between my aching temples, what I had almost forgotten … became clear to me: namely, on what frail ground or rather altogether nonexistent ground I live, over a darkness from which the dark power emerges when it wills and heedless of my stammering destroys my life. Writing sustains me, but is it not more accurate to say that it sustains this kind of life? But I don’t mean, of course, that my life is better when I don’t write. Rather it is much worse then and wholly unbearable and has to end in madness. But that, granted, only follows from the postulate that I am a writer, which is actually true even when I am not writing, and a non-writing writer is a monster inviting madness.”

What would that make the drinker who is not drinking?