There is a time in my past that I don’t often share with others. It was a time when my life was ruled by a chemical substance so insidiously charming that I never noticed it was taking over my life until it was too late. Lord knows I tried to quit. How many times did I swear to leave it alone? How many sleepless nights did I spend wondering why I just couldn’t stop? I couldn’t escape it. It seemed anywhere I went, there it was – so easy, so cheap. How can you possibly end an addiction when everyone around you is doing it? How can you ever escape?
With time, I did escape. I was doing it less and less. I understood that my body really did not need it afterall. I had let myself become a slave to the high it gave me – a high I didn’t really ever need. I understood this. I let it go.
But caffeine is a cruel and jealous mistress. She knows how to make you feel good. You want her, and she knows it. She’s everywhere. She’s watching you. She smolders languorously in simmering coffee pots, tickling your nostrils with her irresistible perfume. She courses through your veins long after the taste of chocolate has left your tongue. She smiles playfully in her icy cans and bottles, refreshing and invigorating you as she bites your tongue with her effervescence. Refuse her, and she waits patiently. She knows you’ll be back. Even as your head aches, and you decend into a listless half-death, she waits. You will be back. They always come back.
I went back. Morning came too early that day; the summer sun pouring into my half-opened eyes, stabbing at my frozen mind like an ice-pick. I had to find something to put me right. If I was ever to make it through the morning, I would need some help.
She looked different, but I recognized her immediately; a little flashier, a little thinner, and I dare say a little sexier. I spun her around to look at her. She said she’d changed. That much I could tell. She’d changed her name, she told me, she sometimes went by Guarana now. She fed me some line about the mountains of Brazil, but I wasn’t really listening. I wanted her already, and she knew it. It was going to cost more this time, she warned, but she’d stick around longer. As a bonus, she’d bring along some amino acid called Taurine – a little lagniappe for old times’ sake.
To make a long story short, I did it, and it was great. So is the shame. She did it to me again, damn it. My friends say I don’t need her. They say she’s bad for me. It’s always so easy to say things like that from the outside looking in. But they’re right. Someday soon I’ll leave her again. It will hurt me, but she won’t care. She’s got better clients than me anyway.
Tomorrow I leave her.
Or maybe Tuesday.
You best leave this mistress of yours. Or you’ll find your wife leaving you to rot in the lonesomeness and cold of the addictive waste you’ve created.
I have tried so many times to stop caffeine, I suffer from severe anxiety, depression, ocd, and insomnia, I take antidepressants, does stopping caffeine really make a big difference?? John