The Dark Night of the Soul – No Caffeine Day 6 - or How to Have Trip without Psychedelics and Do a Deep Dive into Relinquishment

I’m on Day 10, and I’m shocked by how much energy I have. I had less energy when I drank caffeine.

How does this math work?

I was telling someone about what giving up caffeine had been like for me, and after she left, I realized I had left out the Dark Night of the Soul.

Funny how that happens.

I expected head and body aches, but mostly what I got starting from Day 1 was deep fatigue and depressed thoughts. I spent a lot of time on the couch with an eye pillow (I wrote ipillow by mistake) and headphones so I could listen to binural beats and try to imagine I was just a bundle of energy in the middle of space.

The night of Day 6 was The Worst. I woke up after midnight with a head full of foul thoughts. Mostly they sounded like I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE. There was no room for light in my head. I was sad, trapped, and energetically flat as a board. There was no escape. It was just me and my not wanting to be there.

This felt like a psychadelic trip only worse, because this trip had no promise of wearing off. I was tripping on myself. I had the thought that this was the feeling I’d been running from all my life. I’d do anything—eat sugar, drink caffeine, go on Tinder, go running at midnight, take drugs, spend money, worry—not to feel this flatness, emptiness: a brain devoid of dreams or attachments. Life feels like a nightmare. What if I’m always like this? What if I don’t care about anything or anyone ever again? What if this is my true nature? What if nothing can make me happy?

I had the thought: I bet this was what it was like for infant me to be born and have no mother there to hold me. I bet this was what it was like to be in foster care for ten weeks and then to have those people disappear, too, as I went to new people. I bet this flat line is called numbing out. I bet this flat line is called how to be here and not here. I bet this flat line is what taught me how to dissociate. I bet this is where I learned to chase Another State. Anywhere But This State. I felt as if I was like Luke Skywalker hearing Darth Vader say, “I am your father,” only I was staring into the face of Mother Loss and she wasn’t saying anything.

Maybe that’s why I’ve driven across the country 12 times. Keep crossing states. Don’t stay too long, the feeling might come, and this time you might be stuck in it forever.

The hours passed. I lay in bed and listened to podcasts, trying to get my mind to shift gears, until finally I fell asleep.

This too shall pass, always, right?

And it did.

Maybe those flat, hopeless, alone in the world feelings had been waiting in my body all these years for me to be open enough to let them pass all the way through. All I know is that I feel lighter. I also am not afraid of the flatness. I know what happens now. It comes in, it fills me up, and then it leaves. I will shake hands with it next time. I will look it in the eye and not be afraid (or not very). I will understand it’s a guest, and I am the house.

All I can say is, I knew giving up caffeine was going to be a trip because I’d been so resistent to doing it for all these decades. The process lived up to its hype.

But now I can keep all that money I gave to Starbucks and Taylor Lane and Andy’s Market. All that energy I spent spinning from the high of caffeine I can land the plane of me instead and take a look around: hello, Day.

I knew caffeine didn’t support my system, and yet I stuck with it for almost my whole adult life. Isn’t that funny? I think about when Keats was a little girl and said she was too tired to go to school. What if I had just given her an iced Americano and told her to have a nice day as I dropped her off?

Why didn’t I do that?

Why did I let her stay home and rest?