Why Quitting Caffeine Is Such a Big Deal for Me

There was a Coke machine by the front door of my dorm at Kenyon College. That’s when I started drinking Diet Coke as a way to try to avoid the freshmen 15. If I was hungry, I’d have a Diet Coke. The thing is, that never actually worked even though somehow my brain thought it did. I gained the freshman 15 despite the soda.

What I didn’t know was that I was drinking caffeine. Did I feel perkier after slamming a Diet Coke? Probably. I don’t remember.

I started drinking coffee in graduate school. I was in Eugene, Oregon, and coffee was a big deal in that town. That was also when I started getting migaines. I thought to connect the dots between migraine and coffee, but instead I decided to blame them on all the screen time I was spending while writing. 

When I was pregnant, the doctor told me no Diet Coke for the first handful of months. I forget however many. Much to my disappointment and okay, say it, shame, I started drinking it again the moment the doctor said it was okay.

Part of me knew it wasn’t okay. But our culture is a funny one. If it makes money, it’s more likely to be okay to do. 

After Keats was born, I started drinking iced coffee and iced tea so there was no risk of spilling a hot drink on my new baby. Coffee or espresso only worked once a day. I could have one cup in the morning. Any more than that would make me feel confused and bleary eyed, an almost guarentee to end in migraine. The one cup shot me into space and lasted until mid-morning when I would have a Diet Coke or an iced tea to get me out of the hole. This would go on all day. Sometimes I try to figure out how much money I have spent on my caffeine habit. One estimate is $156,950.

Swallow that, Anne. You drank a 2026 BMW XM Label Red if you chipped in another $4,285. You drank a house in Detroit. You drank a lot of caffeine. You drank a lot of money. You drank a lot of your time and effort. No shame here, sweet girl. You were doing the best that you could. But it’s good to note. You have more life to live. That money could go in your pocket or into your gut.

Speaking of gut, here’s the thing you haven’t mentioned yet. Remember that time in that NYC coffee shop when you couldn’t get to the bathroom fast enough? Remember all those times since? You know caffeine speeds up the digestion process, but you can’t help yourself, is the story you tell. You just can’t stop drinking coffee even when you are walking down the street with a load in your pants. 

You are adoroble.

 So now I’m 61, and I’ve spent the past three years since my dad died really trying to feel my feet on the ground and my self in my body. I meditate an hour or two every day. I lie on the swinging chair outside and look at the leaves. I walk in pretty places with Bird. I live in a metal nest, a gentle holding tank, in a garden. I go to an acupuncturist who puts needles in my ears to lower my cortisol.

Then I go to Starbucks to get jacked up enough to drive home in comfort.

Talking to people about my caffeine addiction is a lot like talking to people about being adopted. People dismiss my concerns. They tell me almost everyone drinks caffeine. They tell me they couldn’t live without their morning coffee. They don’t ask many if any questions. They know. I hear them, and I keep drinking caffeine. I give it up for days, sometimes weeks, but then goddamn Peets is right down the street, and there I am, jacked up, back in it.

This is what I know: caffeine makes me not well. I take one sip of iced tea and I’m already shooting out of my head like a rocket. I had DNA work done and saw that I process caffeine quickly. It feels like a drug to me.

Wait. It is a drug. It’s classified as a psychoactive central nervous stimulant. 

Have we talked yet about living with an activated nervous system? Have we talked yet about the trauma that comes with mother loss and adoption and a body that acts like it has ADHD when it carried the ACE scores that cry out CTPSD?

Caffeine brings me home to stress. It makes me feel safe because at first I have sharp focus and then I can’t focus much at all. It’s so familiar. Who am I when I’m not on the lookout for trouble or so amped that I talk and talk and talk like a drunk person? Who am I when I’m not being dragged around by the nose to get another fix? Get in the car, drive to Starbucks, give them your money, get your grande iced tea. Get in the car, drive to the Barlow, give them your seven dollars plus a dollar tip, get your iced matcha latte with almond milk. Get in your car, drive to Andy’s market, get your bottled green iced tea. 

I’m on day four of no caffeine. I know for sure I will never drink it again because, for the first time, I made that decision. The first half of day one was a piece of cake, and it’s pretty much been yucky all the rest except for the night of day two when I felt like I was on MDMA, euphoric and light, free. I’ve barely had headaches—what I’ve had are feelings. It’s like all the things I drank caffeine not to feel have been sitting in my system like pieces of a wrecked ship that got buried under sand. What I keep thinking is: I’m diving into the wreck. I feel so sad, so alone, so afraid, so at loose ends, so hopeless, so without purpose, so tired, so without value. I mean, shit. It’s a  miracle I did not run to a bar and get smashed.

I didn’t do that because I’m in this for real. I’m curious. What is it that I thought I couldn’t face or process or handle? What will happen when I face, process, and handle them now? I’m less afraid these days of something killing me because, at 61, I feel like, death’s coming anyway. I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid of death.

I’m afraid of living.

And that is the thing I want to spend maybe the rest of my life focusing on in my life and in my writing. How do I take a nervous system that learned, most likely in utero, that the world is not safe and get it to have faith and trust in life? What I am seeing with this whole caffeine experiment is that there are things I do to myself to keep myself living in anxiety (spend money so I can worry about not having it, say mean things to people so I can worry about them not liking me, for example). I am seeing I am so much freer than I believe I am because more often than not any traps or prisons I believe I live in are the makings of my own mind, my own behaviors.

Anyway.

When I was out walking this morning, I saw a grocery cart piled high with who knows what. There was a humped up figure in a sleeping bag curled around it. I am so grateful that my biggest problem today is that I have so many feelings.

Thank you thank you thank you.

We are not alone, even though there is often so much evidence to the contrary.