Photograph credit: Empress of Insomnia by Annadriel

“The symptoms of hatching a good idea: despair, insomnia, irritability, mania...” – Alain de Botton

Insomnia has been my closest companion since I was a child. It makes living feel like freefall, every moment rushing past your ears and buffeting you upwards, upwards (but you keep falling all the same). There’s a parachute, and a string, and a number of things you plan on doing before you return to dirt. But you are strangely disconnected from the fall. It is as if you were your own camera crew, filming yourself dropping downwards, measuring the progress, capturing notable moments.

Insomnia is like living under an enchantment. It is a fanged nightly visitor that leaves you drained, waking unsettled and dishevelled. Except it doesn’t so much visit as occasionally go away. It is there, with you, every minute you are awake. When you lie in bed, eyes resolutely shut, uncomfortably aware of your surroundings, you aren’t waiting for a monster to come from the window or under the bed. You’re waiting for it to leave.

Insomnia. Despair. Irritability. Mania. You really can’t take them anywhere.

And yet – living with the monsters does come with advantages.

From conflict comes creativity. From pressure comes strength. You trade sleep for sentences, relaxation for revelation.

Sometimes it feels like my whole life is just one big idea, slowly forming. Or that I am one of the kinetically charged particles bouncing around inside this idea, never seeing the whole of it, but powering it from within.

Who has truly created anything without experiencing pain? Ideas come from friction. Ideas are not the candle we hold up to the night. Ideas are a fire fuelled by the darkness, the unknown.

As I lie awake at night, the darkness is all around me, but refuses to come inside. I lie, and I wait, and I think. I have a lot of time for thinking.

And at the edge of the darkness, the ideas come.