When I drink coffee I get suicidal

I had been clean since March 2018.

Then I relapsed at the end of June 2019.

Friends and family had warned me. Don’t do it.

Some got mad and screamed.

We will have to deal with it when it happens again.

They did have to deal with it.

The trouble is this: give me even a little swill of coffee and I WILL BINGE ON COFFEE.

I don’t know how much coffee I drank in one day, but it was a lot.

Coffee can’t kill you. It’s not physically possible to drink enough coffee in one day to kill yourself. The latest research even 20 or more cups of coffee will not damage your heart.

But it does wreck me.

It’s because I have ADD. That’s ADHD without the visible signs of hyperactivity. You get ADHD when you had a lot of stress as a child. Or when your parents were stressed a lot. (see the book ‘scattered minds’ by Gabor MAte).

Stimulants are far more attractive to me than depressants, like alcohol.

People turning to alcohol seem to have different problems, a need for company that’s not met, a need for sex that’s not met, or even too much joy to share with the world, so they like have to put out the flames of overenthusiasm with alcohol, or perfectionists. Perfectionists seem to like alcohol too.

Not me. I crave alcohol after performing in a theatre piece or when I can’t have a woman. Or when I want to write something perfect.

But stimulants… Dear Lord. If I had a bag of cocaine here right now, I would snort it all until all of it was gone. Thanks goodness that I do not have any access to cocaine whatsoever. Thanks goodness I know that you can’t get quality cocaine in Slovakia.It would be entirely pointless to look for it.

Enter caffeine.

If I could do it without consequences, I would take my 1 liter super size cup, I would fill the bottom of it with table spoons of instant coffee or I would make the strongest drip coffee ever and just fucking drink four liter. Yes, four. Mixed with milk. Maybe five.

And my kidneys would hurt, and my eyes would feel like they were never open before, and I would have ideas. And associations. And I would jump from book to book. And go running at 3 am at night. And I would wake up with the most dreadful jitters, a heart racing so hard I can actually hear it, maybe with a headache, but a headache that would pass with the first liter of rocket fuel coffee.

But the consequences are real. My tolerance builds fast. Even after a few days I already need a bigger dose to get the same euphoric effect.

After a while there is no more euphoric effect. I just need to drink coffee so as not to fall over.

When I stop drinking coffee everything goes dark.

I just wanna die. I want to be gone. I don’t see the point of anything anymore. I want to be left in peace. My head hurts. I crave coffee. I crave feeling alive.

It takes about two weeks to get past this.

It’s horrible.

It could be unique. I don’t know anyone else who reacts the same way to coffee as I do.

It’s very real. Ask anyone who’s lived with me.

I know I have to avoid coffee at all times.

And every time I fall for it again.

That slimy voice inside my head: ‘Ah come on, you can stick to one cup. Everybody drinks coffee. It’s so good. It will help you get stuff done. Don’t be such a baby, you can stuck to one cup.’

Turns out I can’t. Me versus coffee: coffee wins every time.

I love coffee, but coffee doesn’t love me.

It took me ten years to realize coffee has this effect on me…

I have two options: Drink truly gigantic volumes. You know you are drinking too much coffee when your pee really smells exactly like coffee. Imagine the nutrients all this caffeine is pushing out of me…

Or… stay away from it.

I choose to stay away from it.

I cheat with strong tea, but tea doesn’t pack the punch coffee does, and it doesn’t taste good enough to really binge on it.

So when I ask to treat me to a cup of coffee, it’s truly just a cute way of asking for financial support for the content on this site.

(in the picture above, me drinking coffee in Lisbon, Portugal anno 2007, the year I started getting this seriously unhealthy relationship to coffee….)