Lockdown and Addiction

I may erase this post because I’m pretty sure, sort of sure, maybe unsure, possibly positive, that I don’t want to be held accountable.

I have written about caffeine before. I have quit coffee before. Quit iced tea. Quit espresso, Americanos, Diet Coke.

I am very interested in addiction. I have gone to a handful of AA meetings with friends and felt so at home. I thought about lying, about substituting “caffeine” for “alcohol” because I knew I had a drinking problem. “Real” drinkers, I’d discovered generally scoffed at my belief, and I get it. If I were them, I’d scoff too. As in, shut the fuck up. Did you drive your kid to the mall while wasted? You are lucky to be addicted to something so minor. I’ve seen the huddle around the coffee table at AA meetings. I know that my thoughts do not support or improve their journey in that room, and so I learned to quiet, all the while sort of secretly wishing I was addicted to tequila.

I KNOW it’s wrong to wish for something like that, and so I’M SORRY, but at least I could finally feel in alignment with what was going on in my life. I could say “I have a drinking problem,” and people would listen and not laugh when they found out I was addicted to coffee.

Here’s why caffeine is a problem: I have half an hour to an hour, sometimes five minutes, of amped up creatively plugged in delight every morning, and then I spend the rest of the day trying to get my footing back: I’m tired, confused, wondering what I can drink or eat to get me back on the playing field. The rest of the day is spent repairing the damage from the borrowed high.

Here’s the other reason: I’m not sure life is worth living without getting high in the morning. Truly! I imagine waking up, facing the flatline of the day. I’d have to face just how boring I am, just how little energy I have, just how sad I am.

And this is the other reason I want to quit caffeine. Everything I wrote above is more story than truth. My brain is telling me these things that aren’t even true!! I have given up caffeine before and I was FINE. My days were normal—and that was one reason I went back on. There didn’t seem to be all that much of a difference.

But I also didn’t give it more than a few weeks.

Here’s the real real reason I think I should give up caffeine: it changes me. It’s a drug. I believe with 92% of my heart that I need it to live a good life. If I wake up in the morning and don’t have access to espresso, I feel panicky. I am so scared of being without my drug, of facing the day without my hit. The energy caffeine gives you is sort of like buying something at the store with a credit card. I’m asking my body to lend me a boost. I’m taxing my adrenals, messing with Mother Nature. Yes, coffee beans are natural, but putting them in my body so I can feel intoxicated is not. (If you want to argue with me here about this, that’s cool. Come over with gloves and a mask so you can help me weed while you tell me I’m wrong.)

(I’ve had some DNA work done and know that my body is sensitive to caffeine, so what is true for me may well not be true for you.)

Increasingly, I am working on thinking mostly about the past to thinking mostly about the present and the future. As an adoptee, I got stuck in the past as I thought more and more about my mother giving me up, my parents taking me in, all the unanswered questions I had about my beginning days and weeks (and pre-birth months). If my life were a boat, I was standing in the back, watching the churned up water below, the history of the boat’s path right there in the choppy sea. I was not interested in where the boat was going. I was only interested in where it had been.

I have started asking adopted people to tell me about their dreams for their future. Mostly I get silence. They can talk on and on and on about loss and mothers and being little kids, but ask them to put themselves into their body, claim their life, and dream up a future, and it’s like they are standing flat against a wall. Nothing.

That’s me. Standing against the wall. It’s painful to try to think of a future. One. The one life I want to live. The life I would chose. The life I would create. It’s like being a kid at a candy story with all these great choices and being told you can chose one thing. How, as someone who is unsure of their past story, can you chose the “right” future? Better to try to live ten lives at once, committed to nothing in particular. Better not to chose at all.

I’m working on it. Meditation helps a lot. Learning to relax. Recognizing that the body is a record of the past helps, seeing that it is possible to change the body, to break holding patterns, to change thought patterns that feed chemical reactions that tell the body how to feel which in turns tells the mind how to think.

How dare I chose my own life? If I do, if I really claim my future for myself, as Anne, it means that I also lose my hold on the past. My brain tells me that if I’m real, I’m going to have to have lose the dream that one day I will be rescued and get to live my “right” life will be shattered. I will not longer be a child.

Here is an alternative reality: I am an adult living the life of an adult who thinks of him or herself as a whole person. I am allowed to dream of a future, one that I create, one that I want. Letting go of the addictive thinking that I need to live every day in similar patterns so that I will be safe feels like jumping off a cliff. Letting go of the belief that I need to drink coffee feels, just say it, Anne, like dying.

It’s all about the willingness to let go of the known and leap. Even though it terrifies me, I know it’s where the miracles happen, in the space between this side of the chasm and the other. In the willingness to be nowhere for a bit, no one, nothing.

When I’m high on caffeine and then low on caffeine I get to be distracted and stay locked in old patterns. I get to live in the noise of addtiction, habit, old patterns.

COVID, lock-down, social distancing, and masks are taking away so many of our ordinary comforts.

It’s an amazing time to make new habits.

I don’t know who I will be without caffeine. I’ve been self-medicating with the stuff since I was 16, and before that, with sugar.

It’s so easy for me to say, fuck it, it’s just coffee. You’re happier with it. It’s so easy for me to say, Everyone else drinks it.

But I think I need it.

And it changes how I feel: it gives me migraines, helps me poop my pants, provides me with energetic lows after the excellent highs. It doesn’t let me see my true self.

Oh, sweet friend, I love you so much. I love you in Florence. In Boston. In Paris. In New York. In Sebastopol. I love you everywhere I go. I think you have cost me about $29,000. Probably more. Maybe double.

When I move to the front of the boat and look to the future, I feel lighter. I am me without being mindlessly dragged around by something that I think I need to be happy.

I understand I am lucky to have this sort of problem. It’s like I’m face-deep in frosting, talking about how hard it is to chose between vanilla and chocolate.

Amen.