Two weeks have passed since my decision to cut coffee from my daily diet, and it has been anything but pleasant. Since then, I’ve discovered that I am NOT the morning person I once prided myself on being. In fact, it’s best if no one talks to me before 9 a.m. I’m not a night person now, either. I’m just this sort of weird middle-of-the-day person. And who cares to be wide awake then?

 Honestly, I can’t see how anyone has the natural energy to do life without coffee? Man, my hours of daily required sleep have soared from six hours to nine, and I spend just about any waking hours daydreaming about taking naps.

But deep down, I know I did the right thing. Since nixing coffee, my heart rate has returned to almost normal, and those mysterious reoccurring back pains and involuntary twitches seem to have subsided.          

I first got hooked on coffee a few years out of college. It’s shocking that its high-octane ingredients had been kept secret from me for so long. One cup gives me something like superpowers. Among other miraculous feats, I can run a mile, place a complaint with the cable company, and complete an entire Tolstoy novel — all in in the span of five minutes!

Coffee makes me feel as energetic as I believe I’ll feel one day in heaven. It’s like injecting a happy dose of lightening into your heart. With coffee, my blood just circulates better. My eyes don’t burn with sleep as much. My IQ increases tenfold.(Later I learned that I was equally as dense on caffeine, only, without blinking, I could let fly unrehearsed thoughts while maintaining a hazardous, warm, caffeine-induced false reassurance that everything leaving my mouth or pen was gold. This of course was rarely the case. In fact, after coming down off an all-morning coffee binge, I often found myself wanting to apologize to anyone I may have emailed or spoken with under the influence. But, despite these minor cons, drinking coffee promised to make life better.)

Had I known about coffee in college, I’d have knocked out a grade-point average at least ten points higher. Heck, I might even have graduated summa cum laude, whatever that is. Instead, I tried lesser alternatives to perk me up, such as soda and piles of sugar. I failed at pulling an all-nighter during finals week once by downing a two-liter of Mountain Dew. I barely got through my first page of notes before it sent me to bed in a heap with a stomach ache so violent I thought I saw Elvis. By God’s grace, I believe I ended up pulling off a C- on that exam.

What’s funny, I used to hate coffee. It tasted to me like a potted plant or dirty fingers. Back then, I was young and fancy free, untainted by the black caffeinated sludge that would later appear in my system as regularly as blood or bile. Then, one day, my old roommate got a job as a coffee horse at the nearby Starbucks. And everything changed.

I’d stop in to say hi from time to time, first only sporadically, then daily, then hourly. On days business was slow, my roommate would experiment with various coffee concoctions for me to try. The first one he handed me came topped with a ball of whip cream and tasted like chocolate mousse. I nearly spit it out all over my roommate’s green Starbucks smock when I learned there were three shots of espresso in there. This is coffee! You gotta be kidding. Can I have another? 

After that, I drank coffee every day. At first, it posed as a harmless habit. In time, I couldn’t seem to function without it. Whenever I knew I’d have to be somewhere for more than two hours, I’d panic over whether coffee would be served there. And if the hazelnut creamer in my fridge was to run out before I had the chance to buy a backup, then I’d verge on near-hysteria.

This is why I had to quit drinking it: it was slowly turning me insane. Plus, I’m kind of curious to see what I am like off coffee. It’s been so long I’ve forgotten. 

So, I guess you could say that this is a mission to rescue a piece of my true self, which, in this case, is the caffeine-free self. And so far, what I’ve discovered is that I am a very sleepy individual.

Categories: Food, Life
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