endless nights

soul searching through insomnia

When I was 11, one of the most fascinating musical acts in the world was a synthpop project by an artist from Minnesota. The artist’s story was that he started to compose music while suffering from insomnia and living in his parents’ basement. He uploaded his music to MySpace, and before he knew it, he was getting emails from major labels. He recorded most of the album in that same basement, and the name Owl City became a household name with the release of “Fireflies.” For a period of time, I remember watching a lyric video of the song every single night before bed on YouTube on the family computer, and eventually branching out into his other songs like “Hello, Seattle” and later “Vanilla Twilight.” 

Once I heard the story about the music coming from insomnia, I imagined that this beautiful word implied something more lovely than just sleeplessness. Listen to the sounds of it: in-somn-ee-a. How many words let you live in the strangeness of the “mn” sound? Why does it feel so ethereal, seeming to describe something beyond the pale? “Insomnia,” to me, was represented by fuzzy synths and straightforward lyrics, and implied some world of creative inspiration outside of the lives that everyone was living. Despite my ravenous hunger for at least 10 hours of sleep, part of me glorified the experience of sleeplessness, something that I had no experience with.

In high school, I felt a tinge of envy when the classmate who played guitar pretty well would complain about his insomnia, as if he’d been touched by some creative spirit at the cost of his sleep. During the summers, I would stay up late for no reason, listening to music and believing wholeheartedly that being awake past 1 AM would grant me some special understanding of the sounds that washed over me. I distinctly remember listening to “The Persuaded” by the Faded Paper Figures at 1:51 AM one night and being convinced that I’d experienced a song more than anyone else in the world ever had. The time on my phone screen burned into my memory, and the song sounded clearer and more resonant than ever before. 

Once in college, insomnia lost much of its appeal. My troubles with sleep began, and all of my ideas about the glories of sleeplessness and the untapped potential of the night were shattered. Anxiety from school and uncertainty about my future began to seep into my nights, interrupting the blissful sleep that I had enjoyed for so many years. My days were hazy and caffeine-filled to compensate, but the bouts of insomnia would always eventually resolve and come back in spurts.

Insomnia as a word in a music interview may be beautiful, but laying awake in the dark, completely helpless and lost, it couldn’t be uglier. Time makes no sense during the night, and even a familiar bedroom seems bizarre. In the absence of light, nothing looks the same. In the absence of sleep, nothing feels the same. To try to do anything other than lie in bed feels like a risk of waking up more, preventing any more sleep and compromising the quality of the next day. To continue to lie in bed goes against the recommendations from the internet on how to get back to sleep. “Do something calming outside of your bed,” the listicles tell me. But an hour later, I’ve never been more awake, and it’s now 4 AM.

I haven’t been sleeping well for a few weeks now. Fortunately, I tend to sleep for the first half of the night, only to wake up between 2 and 4 AM. On good nights, I’ll toss and turn in and out of sleep for the latter half of the night. On bad nights, I’ll lie awake and let my mind incessantly ruminate about all of my mistakes, all of the shortcomings. In this state, my mind is a weapon, capable of turning everything and anything into something negative. Things that I had accepted or become comfortable with turn into question marks, and the uncertainty of having to take on another day half-asleep looms over everything.

Am I living the right life? I wonder. Am I doing anything? A line from a Radiohead song floats through my mind: I’m not living, I’m just killing time. I struggle to find meaning in everything that I found meaningful before. During the day, I feel mostly okay, floating by through moments of leisure — getting out on the golf course with my friends, watching football together, getting too heated about our fantasy drafts. These things are fun, they feel wonderful, but in my daze, I can’t figure out if anything has a point. I’m unable to be present, self-obsessively turning inward and becoming existential even as the sky is painted in a million colors over a beautiful vista.

I try to fall back on what has always brought me meaning: if I have nothing else, I have this creative practice of writing. But of course, when everything feels like sand running through your fingers, even what seems most stable starts to shift beneath your feet. In this state, do I still have the ability to write anything worthwhile? 

As much as I try to ignore them, I notice how my reader stats have gone down recently. As much as I want to ignore it, my best-performing piece is one that I didn’t like very much. As much as I like to talk about writing, I can’t tell if I’m making any progress, or what progress means, or what I’m trying to be or do with any of these words. Everyone else seems to know what their niche is, everyone else seems to have figured out their whole writing thing, or have otherwise figured the rest of their lives out more, whether that’s getting married or published or creating some forms of art and community that I can’t even fathom creating. 

I look to see if there are ways for me to define myself as a writer, to find a shape that I can lean into and give myself direction and find my way out of this spiral. I stumble upon a quote from the great Susan Sontag’s journals:

The writer must be four people:

1) The nut, the obsédé

2) The moron

3) The stylist

4) The critic

1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.

Immediately, I’m taken by the quote. I love the self-deprecation of it because every writer knows that the process of writing makes you feel like a crazy person, whether by being an obsessive nut or a moron or any other combination of negative attributes that manifest when searching for the right words in front of a blank page. Yet, this self-deprecation only underscores the truth of the statement. Sontag had a long career spanning decades, including the publication of many influential books and essays — if anyone had an understanding of what a writer could be, she would.

In my state of self-doubt, I mainly see myself as the moron more than anything else. When I try to think about how (and whether) I stand out from any of the other millions of writers out there, the only thing that seems to differ between me and most other writers is the consistency of my publication — writing mostly weekly for the better part of seven years must be the sign of the foolishness that that Sontag’s moron has. Does this also prove me to be the nut or obsédé (French for “a person who is obsessed”) if I haven’t given up yet, if I’ve found enough material to fill this many letters for this many years? I can’t be sure.

Most of my focus in my writing practice over the last couple of years has been on person 3: the stylist. I desired to write prose like poets do, with a lightness and control over words that could only come from immersing yourself in language in its most essential form, seeking to find the beauty in each phoneme and making them sing together from line to line. I started to read poetry, I started to write poetry, I began to copy beautiful passages from the books I read, I tried to imitate how they worked and paint pictures with my writing; I’ve only scratched the surface here. 

And at last, there is the critic, the source of intelligence. Oh, Mr. Critic, why must you feel so elusive to me? Even as I write about criticism, attempting to learn how to write more critically and make stronger arguments in my work, it feels like such an uphill battle to try and embody this persona in my writing. The critic is someone who believes so strongly in their opinions that they think they are worth sharing, possibly to convince another. The critic can craft a deeply engaging and instructive argument, can show you new things in a persuasive manner. The critic seems like a worthy archetype to embody, but when have I ever cared about being so didactic?

Would I have begun an exploration into poetry and beauty if I was ever so strong-willed about convincing people of anything? Would I have relied so much on my personal experience in most of my writing when spending time to research deeply, uncover statistics and scientific studies, and reference critical theory and philosophies that would’ve gone so much further? As I think about the words of Susan Sontag, would I ever really want to write the type of work that she wrote (impressive works of criticism about a range of serious and important topics)? As much respect as I have for her work and approach, do they apply to me, someone more interested in the writings of Virginia Woolf and Hanif Abdurraqib? And if not, where should I look instead to guide my path as a writer?

My frayed attention has led me to incessantly scrolling until my screen time limits kick in. I scroll through YouTube until the white screen appears, then Instagram, and finally Substack, hoping that I will discover the perfect piece to serve as a salve to my problems. And somehow, it worked. I found

Rachel Katz

’s essay about re-committing to literary writing instead of the more “observations”-style pieces. I adore the way she described her desired type of work:

Perhaps most importantly, this type of writing pursues beauty. In literary efforts, I am trying, in my feeble human way to, as philosopher John O'Donohue beautifully put it, “go to the deeper octave where we can hear whispers of the eternal.” This is an effort that requires time and space. “The great emergence of creativity,” wrote O’Donohue, “is when the sound comes out of the silence.”

And how lovely such work is. This type of literary writing is what made me fall in love with writing in the first place and that my best pieces reach towards, regardless of how many likes they get. When was the last time I really tapped into the whispers of the eternal? When did I forget myself in this way? Did I let my tiredness interfere with who I really am, someone seeking to channel some sublime beauty? It’s all I’ve ever really wanted, ever since I first saw a painting that made me cry and thought about all of the ways I wished to be able to create such a feeling.

It’s who I am, it’s why I write, it’s where the meaning comes from. This writer returns to the page over and over again to attempt to create beauty, to channel it in all forms. Once again, the writer has purpose. Once again, the man can get out of his head. After spending so much time over the last few weeks feeling unmoored from any sort of path, the mind is sanctified.

I sit in bed, ready to go to bed once again, a bit apprehensive about whether I’ll be able to sleep through the night. Sixteen years after I first started to imagine insomnia as some sort of superpower, it has fueled a thought spiral that clarifies my creative path. Somehow, the cursed reality of my sleep has let me see more clearly. And even if I find myself wide awake in bed tonight, I will sit in the silence with one less thing to worry about.

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We must do what we can to push back against the genocide in Gaza. Consider calling your US representatives to support de-escalation and a ceasefire, donating to Care for Gaza (a grassroots organization delivering food to Palestinians), directly to families or by buying e-SIMs to keep folks connected to their families.

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💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• EP - Songs by Fyfe - I listened to this EP a million times in high school and re-discovered it recently

• POEM - “There Are More Ways to Show Devotion” by Hanif Abdurraqib - have you considered your own loneliness is simply a lack of imagination