2023 was supposed to be my year of getting healthy, and while I’ve adopted some positive habits, the results have been a little wanting so far, in part for reasons outside of my control: a bad case of poison oak, and then a redux reaction after it seemed to have cleared up; a medical procedure inspired by love, involving some violence to a pair of deferential vas, that ended up being more “involved” than it should have been, entailing a month of often painful and dispiriting recovery; and in this last week, a return of my stomach’s contemptible fragility, provoked by the unwise decision to eat a mildly spiced samosa while on a birthday trip last weekend to Harrisonburg. The six days since have been a cauldron of pain and fatigue; everything seems to irritate this delicatestomach of mine, but I’ve gone right on drinking coffee, straight through it. Sometimes it seems like I will sacrifice every happiness in life before I give up my addiction to this bitter stimulant.

“Well, now that you put it that way, it does seem a little ridiculous.”

So here I embark on another campaign of abstinence from artificially stimulating myself whilst slowly paring off the lining of my gastro-intestinal system. I had two cups of coffee today and they brought me no happiness or energy. I felt absolutely terrible all day; struggled to apply myself to my work; and was a useless husband and father. As time goes on, the range of coffee that I can drink without injuring myself continues to shrink — now it seems that I can only have the blondest, the most Aryan of roasts — and notwithstanding this solicitousness for my gut the range of food that I can eat continues to shrink too. No red chili, no green chili, no yogurt — not a whisper, not a hint, not even the slightest ephemera of a whiff! This may not seem like that many foods, but they appear in a great many foods! No Thai food, no Indian food, no Mexican food, no Chinese food … I can hardly even eat at my mother’s. Increasingly, the only food I can trust is the bland fare I make for myself. Even paprika is too much for me! Now that, my friends, is a shameful sentence to type.

I’d like to sleep better.

I’d like to be more patient with my kids.

I’d like to be less prone to anger, when life doesn’t go as expected.

I’d like to wake up feeling rested and cheerful.

I’d like to feel like I can read, or write, or take a meeting, or respond to an email, without a slug of caffeine.

And most of all, I’d like to stop walking this ever-narrowing tightrope, slipping off every now and then and impaling myself on some food that really shouldn’t lay me low, all just so I can keep drinking this beverage that should not have such a hold on me, that I should be able to do without.

In Sanskrit, my name means “whole; entire”. But I’ve come to think that I need caffeine to be a real person, to be productive, to be creative, to enjoy life and a whole range of experiences. In truth caffeine is diminishing the extent of the world that I can enjoy, and even as I continue my servitude to it, catering to it ever more obsequiously, a mildly medium roast or a food slightly out of my normal regimen can still leave me exhausted and in pain, stumbling through the day — but still pouring my daily couple of cups into my already injured stomach. Really, I should feel confident that I’m enough, without this stimulant. But I don’t. I feel like I need this stimulant to live a life worth living, even as my quality of life steadily degrades.

Let’s try to do better, then, shall we? No coffee or caffeine starting tomorrow.

Why will this time be different? Well, on the front end, at least, here’s what I’m going to do:

(1) Drink plenty of water — a cup an hour, through dinner, which should get me about three liters per day.

(2) Take a couple Advil in the morning each day, stepping down after a week to one Advil a day, and then after a week to none.

(3) Do not lift. Do not run. Just go for daily walks.

(4) Do not try to wake up early — well, not before 6:15 am or 6:30 am, to meditate. Everything else can wait until later in the day.

(5) Pay myself $3 per day I’m able to keep to this resolution. Let myself spend these earnings on a gift for myself next Friday, April 7, when I have made it that far — and then two weeks thereafter, and four weeks after that, and so on. I’ll have a cascading set of self-rewards to look forward to.

(6) Eat plenty of protein. I’ve been doing that anyway. That’s a topic for another post.

(7) If I feel really tired or flat, do a set of pushups or sit-ups, or even dips, squats, curls, or rows. Get the blood flowing a bit. (But see #3.)

(8) Take a proton pump inhibitor each morning before breakfast. Stick with that for six months or so.

(9) Avoid the foods that irritate me: yogurt, aggressive dairy, all manner of chili. After a few weeks I will think that maybe I can hazard these things. But I can’t, and it’s better not to try.

(10) And, record my progress here!

I am starting this resolution on a Thursday, and there is a benefit to that. I’ll have some residual caffeine in my system tomorrow, enough to get me through the day. On Friday I will feel a little crummy but the weekend will be right around the corner. Saturday will be difficult — real withdrawal — but I’ll have two days of success under my belt, and not much in the way of responsibilities to attend to. And by Sunday I’ll be feeling better. On Monday, all I’ll really have to confront is the psychological fear of navigating a work day without caffeine — but I’ll already have made it through two work days, by then, so it won’t seem like terra incognita.

Here’s to freedom! There’s a whole other life waiting on the other side of this. I can’t wait to see it.