Steven LaClair (Nothing Original Media)

My life becomes more organized between the hours of 12am-3am. It’s not by choice but rather what I’ve had to adapt to. It’s terribly difficult to get a life together in the middle of the night. What can anyone do in those hours? Most I can do out of the house is drink week-old coffee at a diner and share my frustrations with a waitress who isn’t getting paid enough to listen to me complain. Sleep and I is like the ex-lover you can’t get over. You learn to live without them but always want them back.

It’s not a perfect world dealing with insomnia. It’s frustrating. Believe me when I say I’ve tried it all and still functioning on three hours of sleep a day after cutting out caffeine, regularly working out, eating fit and trying every remedy under the sun. Relationships, grades, stability all suffer deeply without regularly sleeping. It has torn my life apart at points to the point where I’ve destroyed my body with alcohol to put myself asleep. It’s a simple formula of needing energy to function but without one half of the formula it is difficult to live.

The way I describe it may be a bit dramatic. It makes a life a tad more difficult but it isn’t impossible to live with. The downfalls are being constantly tired, irritable with trouble focusing on things like work and school. I learned at some point at the age of 20 that it’s not about fighting it but living with it. I know I’m not going to sleep right now and instead of wasting my time bullshitting myself thinking I’ll be asleep in the next hour I decide to write. I find it relaxing and with that extra 1-4 hours a night I created a thing called Nothing Original. 

I took advantage of the time that I wasted in the middle of the night and shared my thoughts on anything music related. Whether it be talking about a new album or sharing news stories I found interesting – it was something I did until I eventually felt I could fall asleep. It started as talking about issues in the world of music I felt no one was shedding light on and eventually grew into a second job of mine. It’s been my baby and my crutch for three years now and has changed those hours I struggled to sleep into something I could never imagine.

It’s not exactly glamourous. Most people nowadays know there’s no money in journalism let alone music journalism. It sucks a little bit knowing I could never do this for a living easily. I love writing and music so it seems like a match made in heaven to pursue it as a career. But in reality it’s the most taxing hobby I could have picked. The most addicting part of it all was news reporting. Addiction isn’t fun and it doesn’t make sense to some without a substance involved. It’s a rush. The desire to be first to a story that will only be interesting for fifteen minutes before it’s potentially worthless is difficult to deal with. It’s easy to fill and there’s never a shortage of news so I was just constantly filling this meaningless desire.

What’s the point? The views. Nothing Original at one point was doing 100k views a month. It’s nothing compared to other blogs like AbsolutePunk and PropertyOfZack but it’s a great feeling. Being some 19-year-old kid with thousands of kids caring about what I thought was cool. Nothing Original has allowed me to meet my favorite bands, connect with awesome people, form relationships and give me access to more music than I know what to do with