Dear reader. Except for alcohol (which I seem to have a pretty high tolerance level for), my body is very sensitive to any kind of intoxicating substances that people in general seem to be able to consume without any major consequences. Drinking black tea sometimes makes my hands shake. Once, I couldn’t sleep after eating 50 grams of 70 percent chocolate. Coffee simply gives me a temporary personality change.
I know this, and still I sometimes act against my better judgement. Today, I must have been woken up at a particularly bad time in my sleeping cycle, because I never felt fully awake – and once my student council related meeting with professors and other important people started after lunch, it became almost impossible for me to stay awake. It’s not that the meeting was boring, I just kept on having to close my eyes. So, during brake half way through, after two hours of massaging my temples and eyes and pulling at my hair, I poured half a cup of coffee into a mug, filled the rest up with milk and drank it all. The rest of the meeting, I was all ears, making notes, feeling smart and important.
I really like the taste of coffee. It’s just, I can’t handle it. After the meeting ended at five, I found a table, ate some leftovers from my lunch box and started reading articles on biodiversity. Answering e-mails. Searching on the Stockholm Resilience Centre website for researchers doing interesting research, that is, potential supervisors for my master’s thesis. Things just kept on popping up in my head and I couldn’t stop doing them. When people I know walked by, I talked fast and probably incoherently and most of them simply didn’t get the chance to reply. It’s fun, this fast flow of words and ideas, but it is not sustainable. I didn’t leave the university until after nine, and then it wasn’t because I was tired, but because I knew I would need to go to sleep eventually.
I’m just afraid I won’t be able to. I still feel like a Duracel bunny hitting the cymbals together in super-speed. My body is tired, but my brain can’t stop thinking. Seven hours after I drank that half a cup of coffee.
I won’t be able to fall asleep tonight, which means I will be tired tomorrow, which will make me feel I have to drink coffee tomorrow too, which will make me unable to sleep again, and on it goes in a viscous cycle until I can make myself just be tired for one day. Ah, the troubles of being alive.
Katja Malmborg 