Free Radicals
This lingering headache, I feel it’s got to be from the three coffees I drank yesterday. Three cups, that used to be nothing. I could down a dozen, and it would hardly effect me. But, well. Ain’t that person anymore. Body changing here. And, God. All these new rules to learn.
On the plus side, I didn’t get all manic the way I did when I first went on Ritalin and made the mistake to drink just one cup. The headache is new, though. It’s like I’m hung over. Gotta get me them electrolytes, I guess. The enemy of caffeine. Friggin’ dehydration, I swear.
At least I still remain able to drink all the tea I want. Actually it’s funny how tea well can soothe this headache. I know it’s got all these complicated properties, amino acids, etc., but it works so differently on my body from this crazy oil I’ve adopted.
I was never big on coffee until my marriage. It’s only about 15 years ago that I started to toy with it, then a decade ago it got normalized for me. And now, well—that seems to be over.
I know broadly coffee isn’t very good for me, and that tea kind of maybe is. But if they’re gonna affect me like that, it makes the decision all the easier. I like coffee of course, but it makes more sense as a sometimes thing than as a staple for me. I’m not swearing off coffee, but I think I’ve figured out that it’s not going to be a real part of the life that I choose for myself. It was really my thin, as much as it was a thing that I taught myself to appreciate. And I can still do that, sometimes! But, one takes note and one moves on.
That phase where I first tried to force the issue of coffee, I was trying to force a lot of other things on myself—certain behaviors, certain kinds of presentation—in effort to prove people wrong about me. I was kind of insane for a couple years, right on the verge of some major mistakes and also of some major discoveries. All that reactive pressure to perform and show them how wrong they all were,, I think it was the main thing that kept me from finding myself—twelve years earlier, and twelve later than I should have. I was so close. It was pushing the wrong direction, right toward a huge goddamned cliff.
My marriage sort of cut that Gordian knot by feeding me a third narrative of who I was meant to be—then penalizing me daily for failing to be that person. I guess it follows that this narrative also would lean hard into the coffee thing, with all its associations. Of course their ideal partner would be the kind to chug coffee all day. It was masculine, it was powerful, it steeped in all these social indicators. As it happened, I could actually perform that ritual—so, fine. Sure. If that made me ever so slightly less disgusting to the person who held my life in their hands, then no problem. Absolutely. What’s tea? Dunno, I forget!
Dropping coffee now, it’s not just in response to that. Reactive decisions aren’t very useful, right. Often they can be perilous—though possibly less so in this case. It’s more that, the habit never came from inside me. I developed it for all the wrong reasons, and fed it under a broad existential threat. Coffee cam be quite good, but the flavor wasn’t what bound it to me through the darkest part of my life.
From my childhood on, coffee was always someone else’s baggage.
Of course it’s not to blame for my abuse. It’s a beverage. It’s fine. It’s neutral. But its role in my life was as a catalyst to catastrophic dissociation on someone else’s terms. Drawing this line here, it’s an act of self-care. Now maybe I can enjoy coffee on my own terms, as a very occasional thing.
I keep finding boundaries in the wildest places, these days. Seems like there’s no end to the fuckery, like I’ll never run out of habits to unlearn. Relationships to rebuild. Assumptions to drop.
I guess it’s the growth that anyone goes through. But, uh, it feels a little more extreme for Azure, maybe. I wonder who I’ll be when I’m free of it all.