Entry #1

I LOVE coffee. That's probably not the best way to start a journal that is intended to help me stay off coffee, but it's a fact I'd might as well admit. Can you admit a fact? I guess so. Several people (the ones that took my efforts seriously) recommended journaling as a useful tool to track progress, stay motivated, document symptoms, discover patterns, share experiences and so forth, but ironically, I haven't been able to start this journal until now because...I keep falling asleep at night instead of staying up until 2 or 3 in the morning!!! Guess why...

Anyway, back to the beginning: I love coffee. I love how I feel when I'm about to have a cup of coffee, while I'm having coffee, and for many hours after I've had some coffee. I love sharing coffee and conversation with friends, I love waking up and smelling the coffee and drinking it with my breakfast, I love dipping things in it, I love cappuccino, mocha, espresso straight or sweetened or with cream. I feel absolutely wonderful almost all the time when I've had coffee, except when I have a headache, and even then it usually helps at least a little. I can think better, faster, more clearly than when I'm in my non-coffee state. At least I think so. I guess that's one of the things I'll be trying to find out with this journal. I often doubt whether I'd have made it through college and graduate school without coffee. Or wonder whether I would have made it, but not done as well as I did. Or enjoyed it as much. I wonder whether I could have taught all of those classes, or written all of those lesson plans, or poems, or anything else creative that I tend to really enjoy doing with coffee. Coffee helps me to enjoy things more, to speed up my somewhat daydreamy natural state of being, helps me get things done, which I like, makes interactions with other people more pleasant, helps me be (or at least feel) more creative, happy, and energetic.

If all of this sounds a little melodramatic, I know: I hear myself writing it and saying it to people and I feel ridiculous. Except that I'm totally serious. I feel especially ridiculous talking about it with family and friends who have suffered with addiction, though without knowledge of their experiences I don't know whether I would have had the motivation to stop drinking coffee for these . . . ELEVEN days.

So what do I not like about coffee? Why on earth would I want to stop drinking something that makes me feel so great?? That's what I'm trying to figure out in this journal, or to figure out whether the reasons that I think are worth the effort of quitting are worth it. Of course, when I'm motivated to quit they must seem very much worth it, that's how I got this far, but there will certainly be moments where the reasons do not seem worth it at all, and that's where I think this journal will come in handy.

The things I don't like are these:

• waking up and knowing that if I don't have a cup of coffee in the next hour or two, I'll be cranky with my children, I'll do nothing else but make sure I do get a cup of coffee, and if I don't I'll end up with a terrible migraine
• knowing that I've been pregnant or breastfeeding for the last 7 years, and that during that time the coffee I consumed was, as far as I know, leeching much-needed minerals from my system, which is not good for me or for my children
• knowing that coffee also is a diuretic and that, since I also drank way too little water over the past few years, I've probably been a bit dehydrated
• knowing that coffee exhausts the adrenals, something I'm sure I don't need
• not knowing whether I can have the same level of energy and motivation without drinking coffee, in other words, from within myself
• covering up normal feelings of tiredness with coffee, not giving myself a chance to get through tough moments without a chemical

Of course over the past few years I've stumbled happily across articles stating the latest research on the health benefits of coffee, which of course I gobbled up and loved to believe, but you find what you look for, and my body and intuition--I think--knows my body needs at least a break from coffee.

This is day eleven, not only of not drinking coffee (the first three days were weaning myself off of the morning cup--by the way, I "only" drank one or two cups a day, but those were absolutely essential), but of no white sugar or flour. I have to go, so I'll go into that more later. I had a little break with the kids both at friends' houses, so I thought I'd start while I could! Also, I'm worried because tomorrow I'm going to work for two hours (I only work occasionally "outside the home" nowadays), and I'm reeeeeeeally going to want to grab an iced coffee drink across the street before I go. Scoring papers for two hours after having some coffee is fun. Scoring papers for two hours without coffee? We shall see...