One Sunday evening, a couple of months back, I began to experience shallow, laboured breathing. It was after a late night out with friends, and more pointedly, after a 6pm latte, (as you do when you live in LA). I thought I was just tired and needed to go to bed. That was the simplest explanation, until I ordered a chai latte a few dats later, and the same thing started to happen. I was in denial. It couldn’t be the caffeine, surely? I didn’t want it to be. I started drinking coffee at fourteen years old, with my Mum, the year I stayed home. We’d drop off my sisters at school, go “walking” with the ladies and then head to our favourite local coffee shop in Tunstall Square, where my Mum and her friends would sit and gab, and I’d read the local newspaper. My Mum and I developed a sort of codependency that year, and my favourite ritual became drinking coffee in different coffee shops I’d discover while reading a juicy article that made me think about life. When I moved to Los Angeles during the Covid, I felt compelled to give up coffee. I’d sit on the lawns of people’s home in the street behind Maru convincing myself I liked Matcha. I do like matcha, if it is appropriately sweetened, aka if the ratio of sugar is enough to outweigh the bitter quality of the ceremonially prepared green tea. My mother and I had endured a period of no contact and had come out the other side in an awkward and fragile newborn dynamic. She was working on herself, as was I. The implore of tacit inner voice slowly encouraged me away from encounters with the drink, which started to take the shape of feeling like a gentle break up with my Mum. At first it felt like I was missing out on something. That, for some odd reason my body was telling me it couldn’t be part of the cool kids coffee club anymore. Shout out to my experience at school for those triggers. I didn’t understand why it felt necessary. And sure, I could have simply ignored my body, but something magic happened when I listened. It happened very gradually, but when I would return to communing with the drink, it would cause havoc on my digestive system, erratically, not remedially. It prompted me to wonder that perhaps coffee had never been good for me in the first place. Time passes, and I went back and forth in returning to the ritual. I began making matcha at home instead of frequenting coffee shops. The hobby I had when I travelled went into hiatus and became replaced with a morning routine that included reading tarot and writing my first book. It began to feel like a different way of being. When I started dating my husband it felt familiar and delighted that he loved exploring new coffee shops. We had our first date at one of his favourite spots in LA, a place I would come to know and love. Coffee snuck back into my weekly routine.
I’d go through phases as our relationship started to unfold. It wasn’t everyday but it was certainly a couple of times a week. As stressors put pressure on our relationship it felt like a comfort stop while running errands. As our housing situation changed in desirability, it felt like a brief reprieve from how out of control my life felt. When things calmed down and stability started to tumble in, we planned a trip to Australia to visit my folks. It was the first time in five years I was able to visit, and my husband’s first time visiting. I drove past and visited some of the coffee shops that had been so important and dear to me during my early twenties, when I was madly trying to figure out where I belonged in the world. When we returned to a fire devastated LA after our month away, grief had was as thick as the smoke had been in the air. The body primarily stores grief in the lungs around the heart space. When grief has calcified it travels down to the intestines and nestles itself in the colon.
As we settled back into life in LA, my husband spending time on the road, and I, a lot of time at home on my own, I started to frequent our favourite local coffee shop as part of my exercise routine, before a class or on the way to the park for puppy play dates. It’s the same cafe we had our first date at, a place where I’m now greeted with warmth and familiarity. It felt good, it felt like this is what I wanted my life to feel like. Then that fateful Sunday in March arrived.
Things escalated quickly, and on the Friday of that week, I experienced a panic attack. It wasn’t like the panic attacks I’d had before, as the panic had always stemmed from a mental swirl of anxiety. This felt different. The panic had felt like it was being released from my tissues, creating a tornado sensation inside my chest. I was afraid my throat was going to close up and swallowing my breathing into entrapment. I started elevating my voice, trying to communicate the panic I felt inside to my husband. “Do we need to go to urgent care?” He asked, rallying in a pitch of voice he only used when he was scared and confused. “I don’t think so,” I said with wide eyes full of resounding fear. I’d been to the ER for a panic attack episode before. It was during my stay in Barcelona, as I wafted around Europe in between English and American visas. I was sent home with a prescription for Spanish Xanax and a hefty bill for the few hours I’d spent at a private hospital on the outskirts of the city. The only thing that felt soothing was hanging in a forward fold. It felt like whatever pressure was on my system was able to find relief in this familiar yoga pose. I’d like to think it wasn’t entirely caffeine that caused this situation. It could have been the increasing amount of spearmint I was mixing into my nightly herbal teas that caused high stomach acid resulting reflux that aggravated my oesphageal tract, creating the sensation that my throat was constricted. It could have been a change in the dietary supplements I had been taking that seemed to change the pH of my stomach and the regularity of my digestive system. It could have been the shoulder tenderness that was causing tension in my neck that created a strain on the fascia around my throat and down into my lungs. I made a doctor‘s appointment and explained all these things to the nurse practitioner at the Target Clinic in Eagle Rock, and she seemed impressed with how in attuned I was to all these details. The thing was, if I had no idea where this panic came from, then was I really all that in tune with my body? Was I actually listening to what my body was telling me? As I walked back to my car with a bottle of omezaprole to lower my stomach’s acidity level, I began to suspect that I’d need to give up caffeine for a while. That didn’t stop me from purposely driving past a new coffee shop I’d found on the way home, which was uncannily closed.
For about a month following this sobering and unwelcome realization, I largely avoided caffeine, opting instead for decaf, and slowly it became other experimental drinks, like turmeric and saffron lattes, butterfly pea mermaid lattes, and eventually I began to search for the best hot chocolate in New York (surprisingly Maman, but not every location). I’ve been there twice this summer already, learning new skills and processing and dissolving an experience that had thrust me into the grief of letting go. The most prominent thing I began to notice, when the natural exhaust of a living a life without daily stimulant ingestion begins to fade away, was how less prickly my mind felt. The constant, negative voice of criticism and self disdain began to soften. I began to notice thoughts that felt foreign, or that spelled out a falsehood. I began to feel kinder and more compassionate with myself, which made it easier to discern when my masculine energy began to override my feminine energy. Maman, where I was able to reclaim my love of incorporating a warm drink into my daily schedule, means mother in French, and it felt all too eerie that I was finding ways to repair my relationship with myself as I once again, restructured the ritual my mother and I shared all those years ago.
Slowly my ability to take full, satiating breaths without second thought returned to me, which was a supreme relief. On the last day of my time in New York, I spontaneously popped into a favourite coffee shop as a last stop and sayonara to the city. It was around 6pm, again. The barista was friendly and struck up a chat, commenting on how my coffee was a great way to end the day. As I tentatively took a sip, I wondered what would happen. I wonder if all the work I had done to break up with the habit would be thrown out like the coffee grounds used the make the cup. I noticed a little tightness, and I certainly experienced the tapping in of the buzz of the caffeine. It didn’t feel how I wanted to feel. I drank half over the course of a hour, and poured the rest down the sink. It didn’t even taste that good. It didn’t taste worth the feeling. Having those experiences drinking coffee with my Mum and her friends all those years ago came at the cost of relating to each other in a maladaptive way. There are so many other substances that can create ways of relating to each other that aren’t so healthy and good for our bodies. The body is infused with the wisdom we need to look after ourselves better than any other person can. It knows how to connect, it knows how to listen, it knows what we need and communicates that to us in subtle ways. It’s only when look outside of ourselves to have our needs met, either physically, emotionally or spiritually, that we run into a state of confusion and dependency.
It fills me with great joy that my relationship with my mother is better than it’s ever been. We’ve both done so much work, which I sit back and marvel at, every time I write her a card. I have a mother-in-law who is the kindest, sweetest soul, which feels like the gift that came as a result of this introspective healing. The way our habits manifest in our daily lives as an expression of our deepest emotional needs can teach us so much about ourselves, if we’re willing to investigate and unfurl what the hidden desire that lies within them is.
I’m back to drinking matcha, and have purchased a tin of Omanhene Hot Chocolate powder, the brand Maman apparently uses in their hot cocoa. Sometimes it still feels strange that something that was such a huge part of my identity is seldom present in my life, but like the ability to breathe deeply and without worry, I’d rather listen to my body and receive the gifts that come with a softer, kinder mind than continue the habit.