gah damn
on quitting coffee and learning when to slow down
A few weeks ago, I was laying in bed, compulsively reviewing my day, my week, the last year, and then, finally, as much of my life history as I could remember. This is what happens when I can’t sleep. It gets very Defending Your Life and I’m Albert Brooks trying to plead my case for ascendency. I haven’t done this in a while, but I recognized it immediately (and reluctantly) as a manifestation of my anxiety, the kind that appears when I’m feeling particularly powerless and out of control.
The next day, as I was preparing my third coffee of the day, I suddenly became clear on my problem. I zeroed in on the coffee pot. No wonder I wasn’t sleeping and my mind was racing at night. I started laughing and imagined that TikTok sound “Gah Damn” playing on repeat in my head.
It sounds…so obvious. Yes, more caffeine means more nervousness and anxiety. But I can’t always connect that the things I’m doing to my body actually also have an impact on my body, so I had to initiate the awareness of the anxiety to pinpoint the behavior causing it. (Bodies are so exhausting!)
Caffeine might be my favorite drug. I truly love nothing more than sliding into a booth at a diner and ordering a cup, or meeting friends for coffee and talking for hours. The ritual of it is so familiar. As a kid, we often spent weekends at my aunt’s house in Virginia, and someone was always making a fresh pot of coffee to go with breakfast, and then with cake, and then to have on the drive home. During the pandemic, I perfected my at-home latte. I got an Encore grinder, a proper milk frother and a subscription to fancy beans. I felt fully in my morning beverage bag.
My typical coffee routine: I’d drink a little cold brew as soon as I woke up, make said fancy latte drink after working out and maybe make another iced coffee around 4pm. But occasionally I would get so zooted that I couldn’t work at all. Or I’d get so wound up that I’d start doing housework or go for a walk, call other writers and spend an hour or so on the phone to calm down enough to actually write, and sometimes after that, mildly spent, require another hit of caffeine to keep the momentum going. I was always toeing the line between perfectly zooted and heart palpitations. When it was good, it was so good, which is what kept me coming back. I love feeling the mechanisms of my brain sliding into action, fully lubricated, gears flying into high gear.
After a while, it started to remind me of my relationship to drinking — trying to find that perfect zone of enoughness. The line between too little and too much is razor-thin. It’s a wily game that you’re playing with your sanity, at all times. I started to think about quitting overall, but I was deeply worried about brain fog. Productivity dips. Wasted time. It was enmeshed with a fantasy of what my productivity should look like. Which is to say, that I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to perform, to be on, to be valued, to be enough without it.
I did it anyway. This time away is for experimentation, for tweaking all of my character creation sliders. I’d only given up coffee once before, in preparation for a plant ceremony, and I did it so haphazardly that the withdrawal headaches were horrendous and debilitating. I wanted to avoid that at all costs this time around. I slowly replaced my second and third coffees with yerba mate that I made at home, sweetened with a little honey, when I felt a craving. After a week of that, I traded my morning latte for matcha or Mudwater.
One day, the thing I worried about most happened. It was an unusually hot afternoon and my house slowly warmed up until I felt a thick layer of lethargy settling in, slowing me down, pushing down on my mind and body.
I was struggling to read, let alone write. This is a moment when I would have chugged a nitro iced coffee with some oat milk and powered through. Instead, I gave in. I let my head roll backwards onto the couch and I took a nap, one of those shallow summery rests where you dip in and out of wakefulness, resting just below the line of consciousness. And you know what? It was fine. I got up about 30 minutes later, took a walk to reorient myself, came home and kept going.
This year of sabbatical has been a year of stoppages, of halting, of pausing, of trying to figure out how to work better. How to live better. How not to repeat the patterns of the last decade and push myself to the brink of exhaustion, to give relentlessly until I fell into a depressive episode full of existential despair, feeling behind and sluggish. Lazy, even.
In Sisters of the Yam (a lovely gift from Jazzi that’s still influencing me in a big way this year), bell hooks writes about the work that Black women and femme-adjacent folks must do to decouple themselves from unhealthy relationships to work.
“In a society that socializes everyone to believe that Black women were put here on this Earth to be little worker bees who never stop, it is not surprising that we too, have trouble calling a halt,” she writes. “In part, these generations of southern Black people were so desperate to let the racist white world know that they were not ‘lazy’ that they were compulsive about work. Had not slavery socialized the generations before them to be compulsive about work? And yet many of us have adopted a similar life pattern. We do not know when to quit.”
I do not know when to quit. I struggle to even see my life clearly enough to know what I want more of and what I want less of. And as someone who wants to know when to quit, whether it be overdoing it on coffee, unhealthy relationship dynamics, toxic work patterns, it’s wild how one small decision — switching to decaf — has made so much more possible. I’m eager to see what else is revealed in the process.
🌞🌞🌞
the juicy juice
Sincerely Summertime Monthly — postcards created by neurodivergent artists
Speaking of postcards, did you send yours to Sgt. Victor Butler, one of the last Tuskeegee Airmen, who asked for cards in honor of his 100th birthday?
Watermelon & Red Birds and Black Power Kitchen
Black Peace Strategies for the Future of Humankind
A Petition to Protect Riis Beach
This newsletter will always be free. To support the work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This month, a portion of paid subscriptions will go towards The Relf Sisters Fund. Read more about their forced sterilization in the 1970s in a brilliant and searing story by my dear friend Linda Villarosa.