Adventures With Caffeine

The first time I had a coffee, I was twelve years old. It was a proper cappuccino from a proper café. I was a little bit nervous and a little bit excited. But it wasn’t love at first sip.

It took about fifteen minutes, by which time I was in the car, heading back home.

 Fortunately for all those around me, coffee is an acquired taste and one I didn’t get comfortable with quickly, so for a long time I preferred to drink tea or the tame mochachino, neither of which sent me off on caffeine-fuelled bursts of hyper-energetic-ness, which would send me crashing down into apathy once the caffeine wore off.

Coffee only became a big part of my life halfway through my first year of high school, when I was fourteen. As this year had worn on, I began staying up later and later on school nights because I WAS NO LONGER A CHILD I WAS A HIGH SCHOOL ATTENDING TEENAGER AND THAT’S WHAT THEY DO. Consequently, school mornings became an increasing struggle for my sleep-deprived body.

But one day I had an idea. I would swap my morning drink of hot chocolate for coffee, which would surely give me the kick I needed to properly wake up in the mornings and be more alert in my classes at school. I couldn’t believe I’d never thought of it before.

At first, it was brilliant.

I had so much more energy to embrace education and life in general than I did before I started drinking coffee, and it was all thanks to the wonderful powers of caffeine. Everything was wonderful.

But a few weeks into my new regime of drinking coffee at least once a day, something began to happen. I no longer felt alert and energized after my morning cup of coffee. It just made me feel… normal. Meanwhile, getting up in the mornings became more and more of a struggle. My mother would yell at me to get out of bed, and when I finally conquered that feat,

I would stumble through the shower, drag myself into my school uniform, and crawl out to the dining room for my coffee.

Once I got my cup of coffee in me, I would then begin to sit up straighter and feel more normal. But it no longer set my blood zinging with energy and enthusiasm.

My rainbow of liveliness had shrivelled up and fallen lifelessly to the ground. And this could only mean one thing: I had become addicted to coffee.

I now needed coffee to feel normal, and my mornings of fizzy happy energy time were gone.

I lived like this for approximately two years, drinking at least one coffee a day (and often more on weekends) because I was too afraid of what would happen to me if I didn’t. Caffeine became an integral part of my life.

This lasted until one day, as a much older and worldly-wise almost-sixteen-year-old, I came to the conclusion that I didn’t need caffeine and, in fact, putting a drug into my system on a daily basis/becoming dependant on it was a very bad thing to do (side note: I still hold true to this; school just got harder). So I quit drinking coffee. Cold turkey. Full stop. For those of you who have never quit anything cold turkey, it feels something like this:

The first day was the worst. I distinctly remember sitting in a particularly long and monotonous school assembly with a piercing headache, feeling excessively tired, irritable, and generally shit. I was also trying to do several things at once: stay awake, stay in my seat, and not burst out with a string of expletives or start pounding something with my fists. By some miracle, I was successful.

I was in withdrawal for a few days, but each was easier than the one preceeding it, and when my body finally adjusted to suddenly not having caffeine in it, I felt great.

And my new caffeine-free life was, initally, a success. I went months without having any caffeine intake whatsoever. I avoided coffee, energy drinks, and caffeine shots like they were the plague. I was proving that I could handle life without the aid of any artificial stimulants. The first time I had a coffee after giving up caffeine was when I went out to lunch with a friend, and while it was nice it didn’t tempt me back into the world of drinking coffee every day. There were a few other scattered occasions like that, and a few coffees at home during exam time, but apart from that, I was caffeine-free.

This beautifully healthy and natural period of my life lasted until I was introduced to the wonderful package of yay that is NCEA Level Two. For those not in the know, NCEA is my country’s secondary qualification and has three levels, which are studied in the last three years of high school. To make it easier for you to understand how NCEA works, I have prepared a basic summary:

I googled NCEA to see if I could get a decent summary of what it’s all about, and most of the hits I got had titles like ‘Understanding NCEA’, ‘What Is NCEA?’, ‘How To Understand NCEA’, et cetera; mostly aimed at confused parents. To save everyone a lot of time, I made it real simple:

However, whinge-fests aside, I have just completed Level Two. Which, I discovered, is really fucking difficult and often caused many nights resembling the following:

The day after several consecutive nights like this, I had an assessment. And it wasn’t the kind where you write up a paper and turn it in and that’s that: it was a performance for my music class. I’d been practising for this performance all year (to the extent where I may have over-prepared), but as the day wore on it became clear that I would not be able to get up in front of an audience and play Mary Had A Little Lamb, let alone Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. I was so tired that even staying conscious was a struggle. However, I knew (or thought I knew) the perfect solution to the problem.

Caffeine.

I had a coffee and an energy drink before I left for the performance that evening, which I felt was sure to wake me up. And this was when I learned that complicating overtiredness with an overdose of caffeine would make things worse, not better.

By the time I got to school, I was visibly trembling – something which the audience probably assumed was due to nerves but in actual fact was caused by too much caffeine coursing through my exhausted body. Needless to say, my piano performance did not go well.

However, this was not the only time I ingested large amounts of caffeine when I was overtired and then faced disastrous consequences. One Sunday afternoon, after I had been out with my family (and already had one cup of coffee at a café), I was feeling particularly tired but had an important essay to write for english which was due the next day. After my failed attempt at writing the essay without the aid of caffeine, I decided the thing to do was make a coffee. However, the coffee I made was not the normal one-modest-teaspoon kind.

For some reason, I thought filling half the cup up with spoonfuls of instant coffee was a good idea. But what it ended up doing was turning me into a jittery mess of energy, unable to focus on anything for longer than about two seconds or form sentences that made sense, neither of which were good for my unwritten essay. And, instead of trying to focus my energy on that, I decided it would be a good idea to log into my IM client and start up a conversation with my boyfriend. Here are some of the intelligent things I said to him during that conversation (in bold):

“Suddenly I feel like doing my essay. Like, a craving.”

I do not remember feeling this way at all.

 “I realise that I sound vaguely like I'm on drugs or something right now but I'm not.”

Because I didn’t just ingest an inane amount of caffeine or anything.

“I don't actually think it's the caffiene.

 Caffiene shouldn't make you feel woozy in the head.

 Or ADD.”

My boyfriend then pointed out that I kept spelling ‘caffeine’ wrong.

“I can't do words!

 I'm not very good.”

Shit I’m intelligent.

“It's like I've had like five coffies, not one.”

Can’t think why that would be, genius. And, 'coffies'? Really?

“I think I put too much coffee in the cup. I thought it would help me write my essay.”

You think? Really?

 “I think maybe it's cos I haven't had any real doses of caffeine for ages.

And then I just had a big one.

So now it's like, woooooo!

My cells are rushing around on caffeine.”

My biology teacher would’ve been proud of this explanation, for sure.

“Caffeien is a really hard word to type. See?”

Or maybe I’m just retarded.

“I don't feel weird in my head anymore!

But typing is kind of hard.

But I bet I could write a really good essay right now if I tried.”

This makes all the sense in the world.

“This one time, I had a coffee and then I went to the beach. It was Easter and the water was cold as fuck.

When I got home I was shivering like crazy and I didn't know if it was the coffee or if I had hypothermia.

So I put on socks. One had yellow flowers and the other had blue followers.”

Then I started spilling the dark secrets of my past.

“I really don't think I can do anything on my essay right now.

Listen to me.

I'll probably go off on a tangent about how werecaterpillars increase the credibility of society's functionability, which doesn't actually make much sense and functionability isn't even a word.”

At least I recognised the fact that I had turned myself into a babbling imbecile.

“I think I should go away and listen to something really depressing to bring me back down to earth.”

My boyfriend then proceeded to tell me I was being silly, to which I responded:

“I'm not! This is the best idea I've had since I made that cup of coffee.”

My boyfriend was unable to convince me that my idea was stupid and not going to work. And so, convinced that forcing myself into a state of depression would counter my caffeine-induced high, I went away to lie on the floor of my bedroom and listen to sad songs. 

Being sad did not, in fact, make me feel normal and coherent again. But I listened to sad songs for long enough that the effects of caffeine begun to wear off, and I started ‘sobering up’. And then I just felt really, really, really tired.

Even in my now-shattered state, I knew I had to finish my essay, so I dragged myself back to my computer and bashed out something semi-decent that I could turn in the next day. I spent the rest of the night drawing elephants and telling my boyfriend I was sorry he had had to listen to my earlier nonsensical bullshit.