Learning to Run on My Own Fire

A field-note on quitting coffee & sugar, plus a 90-second ritual for the crash

I stopped drinking coffee the way you leave a city you once loved: no drama, just a quiet suitcase and the sense that the skyline had begun to speak too loud.

The first three mornings felt like wet wool inside my skull. Then the hush arrived…not outside, but in the marrow. My heart remembered its slower dialect; my lungs quit auditioning. I learned the actual hour my eyes open when no clock is shouting.

Energy, it turns out, is tide, not switch.

Next I thanked sugar for the door. Harder goodbye. Sugar was the secret handshake I kept with every tired afternoon, every awkward silence. Remove it and feelings lose their cushion. Boredom gets loud; sadness sits upright.

But the tongue wakes. A clementine becomes a small sun. Hunger feels clean, like a rinsed glass.

Each craving is a postcard from a former life. I answer with three breaths: “This is real life returning.”

Ofcourse, nothing is private. My craving was never just mine.

One teaspoon of white sugar holds centuries of cleared forest, cracked whip, drained river. The plantation didn’t disappear; it rebranded.

I stop eating it and the past loses one future customer. A small defection, but it ripples: less profit from another’s exhaustion, less soil asked to forget it’s own name.

A 90-second ritual for when you miss the hit

1. Hold a segment of orange under your nose.
2. Inhale until you can picture the blossom it once was.
3. Place it on your tongue, but don’t bite.
4. Count ten slow breaths while the membrane leaks.
5. Swallow.
6. Whisper one thing you are willing to feel without sweetening.
   That is enough work for one day.

I’m not chasing discipline; I’m re-becoming animal. Furless, but honest. Some people climb mountains for enlightenment. I just stopped drinking coffee. Turns out the view from the ground is plenty wide if you’re willing to taste what’s already here.