I know as college students, many of us have stayed up late and never gone to sleep until probably after our 8 AM. So we’ve easily seen dusk turn to dawn and witnessed the beauty that can only be seen when your eyes are bleary and bloodshot, and you feel the monster with all its sugar and caffeine humming through your veins.

If you are like me though, you stay up for hours waiting for sleep to claim you, and sometimes it never happens, so you just stay up for hours watching the stars move across the sky, like living shards of glass. You watch the sunrise come up not with sugar pumping your heart, but with clear eyes breathing in that chilled air, feeling it ice over your body, invigorating you even as a deep tiredness sets camp in your bones.

So I write this article for the insomniacs (loosely using this term). The people who, while the rest of the world heaves a heavy sigh and closes its eyes, are awake and feel singularly alone because they realize that no one around them understands that in the darkness of the night there is a certain type of honesty and clarity to those thoughts racing through your minds. You scream and you rage in your mind at the night sky wishing it would envelop you in its darkness so you can finally get that sweet release of sleep.

I have advice for you, and I heard this from a famous writer although I forget whom. Write down those thoughts that are supposedly disjointed. Let chaos rein free in your mind and take over; don’t try to control it. Write down those thoughts and see that they have some sort of disjointed connectivity. Let the flames of sleepless nights consume you, and hopefully with it, you burn with the curiosity and the creativity of life.