I am facing the same challenge. I grew up in art museums and libraries, but fell in love with computer science in college. I took literature and art classes when possible, but due to my demanding CS program I did not get to explore nearly what I wanted to.
Furthermore, I found myself surrounded by engineers who rarely shared my interest. In spite of this I continued moonlighting my obsessions and have grown a library of 7 full shelfs (excluding school books, library checkouts, and kindle downloads) and cases of art supplies.
It's common with programmers to look down on wannabe artists that do not adhere to strict logic in creation or conversations. (Just try asking an artist what they were trying to achieve with their piece. Your answer will be a glare of pity mixed with disgust. I often find, thought not always, this is a diversion tactic because the concept is to "fuzzy" to convince anyone of it).
But when you strip Great Art to its pure essence you will discover a philosophical theory that adheres to a form of logic. We are not completely in the wrong to view this with skepticism since many pseudo-artists can not see this, let alone create it themselves; their only option is to fake it and hope their bravado convinces other. With programming we have no such luxury, if you are incompetent no level of bullshit will make your design work.
This leads me to my current situation where I am trying to find a way to integrate my love of programming with my innate drive to explore beyond the limitations imposed by my code. For now this means waking at 5am, writing for 3-4 hours, going to work until 7, writing a few more hours, then sleep.
Believe it or not, this regiment actually makes me a better programmer. I find myself not only more relaxed during the day, but often am able to rethink my solution and identify flaws instead of powering into the code as I once did.
I am not sure this helped, but my main message was that learning to think about things in a different way gives you a versatility that manifests in ways you may not anticipate. In my case, I feel it helped me be a better coder. (Think of it as studying lisp even though you primarily code in C. Its an exercise that gives your brain flexibility)