Rhi Axtell – Writer

I can’t drink coffee and everything is awful.

This is one of the glorious side effects of ‘the illness’ which started last month. I haven’t had a cup of coffee for weeks by order of my doctor. I’m sad. I miss my bitter, brown, brain juice.

I even had a mindfulness practice built around coffee. I would sit down at around 10:30am with a hot mug, cradle it in my hands, and enjoy the sensation of bringing the mug up to my lips and sipping the coffee. I would breathe in the scent. I would hold the liquid in my mouth for a second and focus on the sensation of swallowing it. I would wait for that urge to take another sip, reflect on it, and then do so.

You know what the actual awful thing is though? I don’t miss it as much as I thought I would.

I thought I was a full-on coffee addict. I was so sure of this that I even made it part of my identity. “Oh I’m such a coffee addict,” I would tell my friends and family as we queued in a coffee shop. “I have to have my coffee every day or I can’t function“.

But, after replacing that morning coffee with a green tea with jasmine*, I realise that I was not addicted to the coffee, but the performance. I loved being able to drink coffee and make a big thing of it, and have my wife look at me and go “Ew coffee is gross,” and then I would laugh and she would laugh.

*I bought a box of teabags called Moonlight Jasmine which encourages beautiful thoughts and is, as my mum put it, ‘really posh’.

You can take the kid out of the theatre, but you can’t take the theatre out of the kid. I’m a storyteller at heart (as a lot of us bloggers are, I suppose!). It does make me wonder how many other aspects of my life I do just for the performance though. Something worth exploring.

Anyway, I’m off to have a cup of moonlight jasmine tea because I am oh so posh and fancy and look at me. Who needs coffee, eh?

See you next time.