Recently I’ve had several nights where I couldn’t get to sleep, or went to sleep quickly but woke up again and couldn’t get back to sleep. After several weeks of this, I finally went to see my doctor. He tested my heart–which was fine–and then asked the question I feared most: “How much caffeine are you drinking?”
Now, compared to many Americans who can’t function without polishing off an entire pot of office coffee in the morning, drink soda with lunch, and down super-caffeinated “energy” drinks to make it through the afternoon, I have a modest habit. I sip just one, sometimes two, double lattes in the morning, depending on the challenge of the work I’m doing (a recent project for the Army required a minimum of two double lattes, just to help me unscramble the acronyms).
I have also been drinking said lattes since I was a graduate student at the University of Washington, and Starbucks had only one location.
The doctor, however, was unsympathetic. “Caffeine doesn’t change,” he said, “but people do.” So, I came home and began The Great Experiment: starting my day with no coffee.
A colleague of mine once said that someone should write an honest book about writing, entitled: “Get Fat, Get Drunk, or Get Cancer: How Writers Really Write.” Her point was that writing is an oral activity, perhaps a subconscious shift from speaking aloud to speaking internally, but it activates the nerves in our jaws and one way to exorcise that tension while writing is to either eat, drink, or smoke. Most writer’s autobiographies support her argument.
My solution is to drink coffee. So while for the doctor this was a health admonition, for me, it was a direct attack on one of my most sacred and productive writing rituals.
I can only think back on a family story concerning my grandmother. She lived a puritanically clean life, and therefore struggled when her preacher challenged his congregation to look deep into their lives and identify anything that they were attached to, “because if you can’t give it up, then it’s a sin.” The only thing she could come up with was her morning cup of coffee, which she dutifully gave up for two weeks. At the end of the two weeks, she drank her coffee, went to church, and told her preacher that anything that does a body that much good can’t be a sin.
I’m still drinking decaffeinated coffee as a trial and, unfortunately, I am sleeping better, but I think my grandmother had a point. I think anything that does your writing that much good can’t be bad.
