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the last time i wrote about this, i was in a much different state of mind. i was worried about dependence upon caffeinated drinks and my psych meds. it turns out, i was doing some foreshadowing and i didn't even know it.
the entire summer passed without incident and then, around October or so, i stopped taking my psych meds altogether. this resulted in a slow decline leading to a short hiatus which required me to readjust to taking medications and reconsidering my caffeine intake.
it's still a process.
i've been taking my meds every day since i restarted them, and it's made a huge difference in my life. but i've also increased my caffeine intake somewhat. i used to drink coffee once or twice a week, and have an energy drink maybe once a week. now i'm having 2 or 3 cup of coffee a day at work and energy drinks at least twice. that might not seem like much to a lot of people, but considering my retrospection, i've more than doubled my caffeine intake. that's similar to what happened before i quit nicotine. when my grandfather died in 2024, i bought a pack of cigarettes with the intention to finish it over the week i'd be in Pennsylvania. instead, i smoked it in 2 days, bought another pack, and was back to smoking a pack a day. when i flew back to California, i picked up a vape thinking it would last me even longer and slow me down. instead i was vaping virtually all the time. the Geek Bar vapes i was buying are estimated to have between 4 and 5 packs of cigarettes' worth of nicotine in them... and i was blowing through one every other day. that means i practically tripled my nicotine intake in less than a month. i finally quit last January and have been off of nicotine products for a year and 5 months at present.
but this all gets me thinking.
i was having a discussion with clients at work about harm reduction versus abstinence. at this point, i've limited my sugar intake and eliminated nicotine entirely. i've been sober and abstinent for almost 6 years. but i have had this uptick in caffeine. i'm not worried about my psych meds anymore. i have reckoned with the fact that i will absolutely need to be on something for the rest of my life. but when clients are asking themselves and each other (and me, as a counselor) what life could look like if they traded one drug for another... i have to compare that to my own chemical ingestion (even if they're legal and well-regulated chemicals) and draw parallels.
so anyway i'm probably not going to stop drinking coffee and other caffeinated drinks, but i might could slow down some. i can't completely remove sugar from my diet but i can make some more informed choices about what i consume.
all of this is to say that i have what i believe are realistic fears and expectations about myself and what i'm doing with me.
and i have a healthy reminder that it could always be worse.
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