At 1:30 this morning, my two-year old daughter began crying.
I went into her room, picked her up and rocked her, and told her everything was okay and she could go back to sleep. She passed out in minutes and I laid her back down in her crib, where she blissfully resumed her slumber.
A strange and selfish parental thought occurred to me— that I wished I had a way to invoke rest when I found myself wide awake in the early morning hours.
Then I thought: that’s what alcohol and writing are for.
At the time this occurred, I had been awake in my office for over an hour, scribbling away with revisions on the second book and one glass shy of killing a bottle of red wine after a failed bid to sleep of natural causes.
Insomnia had long been an erratically recurring event whose cause I could rarely assign blame for. Sometimes the tension and rush of energy was vaguely creative in nature— no surer death sentence to sleep existed than immersing myself in a story just before bed. Sometimes I could attribute it to war, when I would suddenly awaken with all the physiological effects of a firefight despite being removed from my most recent deployment by months or years.
But far more often, the inability to sleep was instead associated with nothingness; a violent return to consciousness after an interim of laying in bed, during which I could rarely be certain if I had actually fallen asleep or not.
Regardless of the cause or lack thereof, my solution was the same. Insomnia meant drinking and writing, often with prodigious effort in both endeavors.
The supremely frustrating experience of being unable to sleep despite being tired could easily, with a glass and a keyboard, be translated into wild levels of writing productivity. Off the cork to the bottle came, out the drink flowed, down went the heartbeat and pulse to normal human levels where I could process what I was feeling, could glance at the computer screen and see I was crossing a page of running thought that joined the ranks of a thousand before it.
And once I’d typed the last word that came to mind, whether that occurred after one hour or three, whether the effort was a fictional one or merely a rambling stream of consciousness that would never be viewed by an outside observer, I could go to sleep as peacefully as any human on earth.
Since becoming a husband and a father, I have periodically attempted other solutions in an effort to find some more responsible or medically approved cure. Pills ranging from Melatonin to over-the-counter sleep aids to prescription Ambien have found their way into my system, washed down with chamomile tea as I tried to follow the pre-sleep rituals recommended for insomnia. Their effects have ranged from none at all to being able to sleep through the night only to spend the following morning feeling groggy and listless.
So when I left military service a few months ago, I entered the VA care system to request a single pharmaceutical intervention: something to help me sleep.
For this I was prescribed Trazodone, whose name I knew well from the positive experiences of more than a few friends who maintain running prescriptions.
I experimented with this drug in ever-decreasing doses for a few lonely nights, finding each trial nonetheless like a lobotomy that left me awake, yet unable to write or, worse still, to think. Whereas alcohol ignited a creative spark that would burn until my body was ready for sleep, Trazodone only numbed me.
When the pill’s effects began infringing on my ability to think and function the following day, I threw away the pills and restocked my liquor cabinet.
Since then, I’ve gone back to what I know— when sleep doesn’t come, I pour a drink, roll up my sleeves, and keep typing. Writing remains my therapist, the same perfect outlet it was when I discovered it over a decade ago, with alcohol its willing and steadfast accomplice.
Before meeting my wife I considered my writing output the only meaning I could make of my experience.
And now, joyfully married with my beloved toddler blissfully slumbering away in the next room, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. But I still have nights that turn into a profound inability to sleep, and on these not infrequent occasions I still find my solace by gazing into the depths of a computer screen with a glass at my side.
The view is infinitely better today than it was when I discovered this cure in the first place, my writings now coming from a place of genuine creative impulse rather than depression.
But my personal solution still works as it always has, regardless of the depths or sheer ecstasies of my life experience. Writing and drinking remain symbiotically intertwined when I find myself the only one awake, continuing to draft new pages until sleep returns again.
Jason Kasper is the author of the David Rivers Series. Read more and contact him at base1178.com.