The ridiculous thing about war is that I remember being excited.

For the first 90 days or so, I was constantly excited, and I don’t mean in a “joyous,” emotionally positive way. I mean excitement in the strictly physiological sense: raised heart rate, increased breathing, mind racing a mile a second.

That state could describe love, rage, anxiety, surprise: any emotion that would energize you, for better or worse. I was in Iraq in 2004, and whether it was Baghdad, Najaf, or the outskirts of Fallujah, every time outside the wire was a heart-pumping exercise in hypervigilance, nervousness, anger, and fear. Good excitement, bad excitement, it all just ran together.

What goes up, however, must come down. After the adrenaline high of the mission, I’d crash in my cot afterward or struggle to maintain watch at 3 a.m.

Then we came home and I thought I’d left all that behind. I certainly left Iraq behind and all that “excitement.” I wasn’t one of the guys who needed that adrenaline: I didn’t buy a motorcycle or a Corvette and terrorize the highway patrol like some soldiers. Instead, I brought home a weird, baseless excitement that would randomly hit me at night.

I brought home insomnia.

It felt like I had caffeine too late in the evening. Some nights I would try to sleep, but my body and mind couldn’t calm down. My heart pumped like I was up and walking around, and my mind wouldn’t slow down.

It almost didn’t matter what my thoughts were fixated on. Sure, sometimes I would think about all the work that needed to get done for an upcoming field exercise or an argument I’d had—the normal things that keep people up.

But a lot of times it wasn’t anything important at all. Sometimes I stare at the ceiling as my brain rehashed the eagles plot hole from Lord of the Rings, or I’d think about how to improve my chili recipe. I lost a lot of sleep thinking about legitimately moronic stuff.

I tried suggestions from friends, like herbal teas (which did nothing) or melatonin (which only made me drowsy the next day). A doctor told me to exercise to tire myself out before bed, which actually made things worse because my body took forever to return to its baseline after a run. After that failed, he offered me a prescription for Ambien. I declined. At that point, I knew a few people, including some fellow vets, who were struggling with substance abuse. I wasn’t interested in being next in line for that little ride; no thanks.

I figured it was something I needed to grow out of, but it seemed to be on some kind of cycle. It would hit sometimes, stick around for a week or two, then go away, only to return a month later. Nothing natural worked well enough to mitigate it, and I wasn’t willing to try a prescription-strength solution. I felt trapped.

One night, when I was wandering the apartment, having given up on staring at the ceiling, I picked up a book that my then-wife had been reading, to give myself something to do.

I’d always been an avid reader, so it seemed like a good idea. Suffice it to say, I didn’t enjoy it. I’m definitely not the target demographic, and I won’t name this particular vampire romance fantasy that was popular in the early 2000s, but after I read a bit of it, I felt I needed to balance the literary scales with some writing of my own.

So, I sat down at my computer and started writing. I wrote chapter one of what would become my first full-length fantasy novel, and after I was done writing those first six pages, I went to bed and slept like a baby.

That first week was the most exhilarating. I wrote every day and finished 36 pages by the end of the week. The most I’d ever written before that was a 25-page capstone project to finish my degree. Later, I slowed down and settled into a more sustainable pace, but when I did that, I realized something: I was sleeping. As long as I continued to work on the book, the insomnia stayed away.

Previously, it was like my brain wouldn’t let me sleep until it found a problem and solved it. Once I started writing, I finally had something significant to work through, so my head would finally let me rest at night. Sometimes, if I’d just written a particularly satisfying section of my book, I wouldn’t need to write for several days, as though the insomnia monster had just eaten a big meal and would need a while to digest it.

It was not a perfect solution. Far from it. I had found something the insomnia monster liked to chew on, but that meant I had to keep feeding it.

Over the years, if I got stuck on a piece of writing, my sleep would suffer again. But for the most part, I finally had a go-to solution. Regardless of whether I worked on a novel or a short story, after a few hours of writing, I could always sleep.

I admit it’s not ideal to write until midnight when you have to be up at 5 a.m. the next day. But without the writing, I sometimes never went to sleep. I’ll take five hours at night and a nap during lunch over nothing at all.

Writing fiction remained my go-to whenever insomnia hit, though it never occurred to me that it should be anything more than a hobby to keep my mind from turning on me like a rabid raccoon in the middle of the night.

However, a few years ago, author Melissa MacKinnon became my neighbor. I showed her the first book I wrote, and she said, “It needs editing. … But you’ve really got something here. You should keep going. You should get published.”

I’d heard plenty of words of encouragement from friends and family, but hearing it from a published author changed things for me. When I returned to the keyboard the next time, it wasn’t just to calm my mind, it was with the intent of finally publishing something.

Denithor the Librarian became my first published novel. In it, the hero, Den, is a warrior who wants to learn magic, but no one will teach him. So, he got a job at the library and taught himself. Writing has been like magic for me, a way to conquer insomnia. Like with my hero, Den, that magic didn’t come to me easily. I had to find my own way.

This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.