The Coffee Protocol
On coffee and all the things we're told to do
Good morning! I’ve started writing this post in the airport waiting at my gate. I’ve had a pretty busy past few weeks (it’s also 5:18am) so maybe cut me some slack? or maybe don’t because social pressure makes me do things. Here is another post that has nothing to do with disability… we’ll get back to it eventually.
You got yourself a coffee this morning.
By that you mean panic-ordering what now seems to be a cup of whole milk with a shot of espresso and french toast flavored sugary syrup. It doesn’t taste particularly good, but you’re calling it an act of self-love.
Some mornings, you do this. You treat yourself to a coffee out. The range of drinks that you are now allowed to call “coffee” is quite impressive, you think. A vast range of different syrup and alternative milk combinations now fit under this single word: A cup of oat milk with caramel-flavored sugary syrup and ice, or a cinnamon sugar flavored syrup with coconut milk and a shot of espresso. Coffee? Sure!
For the first time the other night, you made yourself a cup of after-dinner coffee when you got home. After-dinner coffee! It didn’t matter to you that the coffee was actually not good coffee. It also didn’t matter that you drank it out of the same mug you drank this morning’s cup out of. It's after-dinner coffee! You’re drinking coffee at night! It’s romantic. Why don’t you do this more often? This is amazing! You feel so productive! And it’s 9pm! This is the best kind of coffee you’ve ever had, you think.
You recognize that this might be an act of self-sabotage, sure. After dinner, coffee is saying, "I don't care how I will feel in three hours when I’m inevitably staring at my fan and rolling around waiting to fall asleep, thinking about all the things I could get up and do right now or about people I should respond to or the things I could be writing, even though it’s far past midnight and every possibly interesting or insightful thing I’d try to say now would come out as total gibberish and today was utterly meaningless and I shouldn't ever have coffee after 6pm again and I actually have accomplished nothing with my night and my day and my life.” You’re also self-aware enough to to know that you’re probably being dramatic.
Some days you have the clarity to remind yourself that this is just reflexive self doubt and you’re just exhausted and all you probably need is a good night's sleep and to go on a run and you'll feel better. Other mornings, it’s an unsolvable puzzle. Moving through the day and keeping track of all of the things feels like an impossible task.
Your body becomes angry. She tells you so with tight knots in your chest that make it hard to breathe or with red splotches that appear on your skin. She becomes a crumbling castle, and you are desperately trying to reinforce her but can’t seem to keep up. She wants something and you don’t know what.
Some mornings you decide to do something about it. I can fix her! You opt to drink your coffee black and listen to Andrew Huberman in the morning. He tells you to implement a cold shower routine or some healing visualization protocol (I like the guy but my god! Can he stop calling everything a protocol?!). You go on a run and you take that cold shower. Your body feels good; you take a deep breath. You’ve got this whole health thing down, you think. You give your body magnesium powder that tastes like lemony chalk. You take the ‘Women’s Health’ gummies, despite having no idea what they actually do. You go to work. You take a walk. You get sunlight first thing in the morning. You commit to a disavowal of bread. You read a book on surveillance capitalism, and learn about the higher incidence of ADHD in the US. You know what needs to be done, so just do it for God’s sake!! You should wake up earlier, spend more time outside, delete social media, meditate every day, stop eating refined sugars (or was it gluten?) and get off your computer.
These are some of the thoughts going through your head right now, sitting in the airport as you realize you’re simply just tired and you are so unbelievably lucky and your life really isn’t that deep and you’re only 22 and you should just enjoy your syrupy-milk drink that’s in your hand right now.
You’ve never felt like you’ve succeeded in loving yourself through all of this trying, at least not with any consistency, but some mornings you wake up only to realize that you've left a big mug of yesterday’s coffee in the fridge overnight to microwave because you knew you would want it in the morning. Maybe it tastes good or maybe it tastes bad but most importantly it’s warm, and it helps you wake up, and you cared about yourself enough last night to put it in the fridge.
Imagine being able to give yourself exactly the thing that you need and having the self awareness to know exactly what this thing is. Is it a cup of coffee? Maybe! Or more likely, it is the small moment that brings you back to your feet, to your taste buds, to your body.
Last week, you go a run on the riverwalk in Chicago.
A curtain of steam rises from the river and the wind acts as a shield against you as you move (let’s blame your slow milage time on the wind). The air is dewy and you breathe it in heavily. Your body is tired; your feet are sore, but you are here. Hyper aware now, of the panting and sweating and feet slapping the sidewalk. Your body is alive, your lungs are pumping, your feet are aching! Around you remains a feeling that cannot be replicated, or written, can only be sensed here, now.
All that being said, knowing you, you’ll probably keep trying the cold shower thing, and popping the gummies and deleting and then redownloading Instagram, and buying yourself the “coffee” but more importantly, you’re beginning to recognize it might be time to give yourself a little bit more grace with all of this.
We do our best and sometimes our best is really pretty good and sometimes our best is a joke. Yes, some of these things (certainly not the awful magnesium lemon chalk powder) make you feel better but I think your greatest act of self love is being where you are and accepting that. I don’t think it really matters how small the aperture is, how minuscule the moment is that brings you back to now, or whether this gesture leads to some larger consistency. And sometimes that moment really is just coffee.
YES
I LOVE THIS