Caffeine, Hunger, and Adoption

I hadn’t realized just how much I used caffeine as a substitution for food until I went cold turkey 13 days ago and stopped drinking espresso, iced tea, matcha, and Diet Coke. It was not unusual for me to some some combination of all four beverages in a day. Drinking caffeine was a balancing act—get high in the morning on espresso and exercise and then some matcha, and do my best to deal with the energetic and emotional rollercoaster that was the rest of the day

The question was: if I don’t start the day with espresso or matcha, what the hell am I supossed to have? Food? Will that get me high? And what is safe to eat, anyway? What won’t mess up my already messed up digestive system? What won’t mess with my already messed up blood sugar levels? It was often easier not to eat than to eat, especially when I could numb my hunger with an iced Americano. 

Since quitting caffeine, I have become an eating machine. It wasn’t that I didn’t eat before—I’ve always had a voracious appetitie—but in the morning, for sure, I preferred the rush of an activated nervous system than a full stomach. In the afternoon, too, if there wasn’t some sort of caffeinated beverage that went with lunch, it was like, what’s the point of all this food if I’m not going to get high? 

What I realized is that I had been asking my body to exist on stress hormones. I mean, duh, I knew what I was doing—I was drinking a drug that activated my sympathetic nervous system, my sense of fight or flight—but somehow I didn’t really get what I was doing. I was taking an anxious person and essentially dousing her in anxiety and calling it a smart start to the day. I was adding fuel to a fire that already had me snappish and short-tempered and light-headed much of the time.

It was what I knew, I guess. I’d been talking about giving up caffeine for decades, but I never could find a reason good enough. Then my brother died, and in my meditations I started meeting with him at the bottom of the sea, both of us in beach chairs. In my meditations, he could sit calmly and wordlessly and look me in the eye, and I could not do the same for him. Even in meditations, even deep under the sea in my mind, I was strung out on caffeine, restless, unpin-downable.

I realized it wasn’t just my brother with whom I could not sit still and be present, it was everyone. Most particularly, it was my daughter.

That was what got me to quit.

I want to be present for her, with her. As Mary Olviver said, When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder/if I have made something particular and real./I don’t don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,/or full of argumement./I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

When death comes, in other words, I don’t want to be in the drive thru lane at Starbucks when I could be sitting across from my daughter, seeing her with a mind that is clear and undisturbed. Or at the bottom of the ocean with my sweet brother Sam.

Giving up caffeine was hard, but it was not a struggle of will. Not once did I think I would quit. It’s so helpful to know what you really want because then all the shit that used to get in your way evaporates or becomes meaningless.

But I want to get back to food.

I feel like I could trace my addiction to caffeine right back to the day I was born and was given Baby-Scoop-Era formula. Instead of getting what I really needed, I was given something to keep me quiet and maybe a little blown-out from all that sugar. I feel like I’ve been using any variety of things just to keep my head above water ever since that day I popped out of my mother’s womb and into the arms of who knows who.

Sugar. Caffeine. Whatever it took to not feel empty and alone, whatever it took to not feel whatever had been packed down deep inside. Just keep it coming.

Now, without caffeine to keep me running on the fumes of stress, and with menopause somehow having put the kabash on cravings for sugar, I crave the grounding of real food. I eat lots of fruit and vegetables, big gobs of Strauss Creamery Greek yogurt covered with nuts and berries. I eat lots of eggs, tofu, tempeh. I live on an organic farm, and so I pick tomatoes, and eat them with avocado. I found a kind of seed bread at the local health food store that feels like it weighs about five pounds. I eat slices of that slathered with pumpkin butter. I make smoothies with spinach and berries and protein powder that tastes like chocolate. I eat dark chocolate I keep cool in the frig. I eat and eat and eat. I feel like I’ve shifted from a contest where I want to see how high I can get, to seeing how much sunlight and rain I can eat. How much goodness I can put in my body. Taco Bell doesn’t call to me any more because without Diet Pepsi, the food isn’t good enough to bother ignoring the trans fats. I’m letting myself sound like a holier than thou health nut because I’m so goddamn relieved that I am actually behaving this way. I mean, I want to eat like a health nut, not because I’m trying to be good or because I think I should but because my body keeps saying Yes, Yes. More of that! I know my body is saying yes because I don’t have headaches or stomachaches, and my mood and energy levels are generally good. I have a lot more energy now than when I was drinking caffeine, much to my surprise.

I read the other day that fruits and vegetables are essentially crystalized sunlight. I don’t know what that means or if it’s true, but it makes me happy. I like to think about eating sunlight. It sounds like a way to eat goodness. When you are angry and depressed, eating sunlight, at least for me, sounded stupid. Taco Bell made a lot more sense. I didn’t want to eat light—I wanted heavy. I wanted to eat and drink things that got me out of the state I was in, which was generally somewhere on the rollercoaster.

I don’t care if I gain weight. I don’t. I’m appalled and a little embarrasssed that being sort of skinny was more important to me than meeting my body’s hungers. I guess this is one of those rewards that might come to some people as they hit their sixties, like me. Who gives a shit what I look like-itis.

I just want to feel good—alive—real. I want to give my body a chance to do its thing, to be itself, free, unconstrained, with its mouth wide open because it knows something good is on its way. My body. My body. Right from the start it was asked not to be what it was—don’t be mine, my first mother said. Be mine, my second mother said, but don’t be hers. I told it, you’re not good enough. Be quiet. Be small. My body wants to stay alive, so it keeps trying to make everyone happy. But my body has its own songs to sing, its own dance moves. It just needs space and love and supportive fuel to unfurl, to speak.

Sorry if this sounds preachy. I”m just so excited to get the chance to listen to my body instead of the chasing my own tail as I try to address whatever low or high I’m on because of caffeine. It turns out Anne is not exactly the same person as Anne on caffeine, and it’s fun to find out the differences. You do you, truly. I want everyone to do what makes them happy. I’m just talking about what it making me feel happy, today. Okay? Who knows. Next week maybe I’ll be at Taco Bell at 1 AM, smoking a cigarette while ordering two bean burritos. Anything’s possible. Then I could write about how great nicotine and trans fats are. So be it. Carry on.