I Am Emotionally Abandoned by the Beans

The betrayal begins at cup three

Once Upon a Time, Coffee Was Enough

One sip and the fog cleared.
Two sips and you believed again.
Three? You were filing reports and solving intergenerational trauma before 10 a.m.

Now? Nothing.

Cup three just makes your fingers jittery and your thoughts sad in italics.
Your eyeball twitches like it’s sending Morse code for “please stop.”
And somehow, you’re still tired.
But now with faster blood.

• Make you feel sharp
• Sustain illusions of momentum
• Act as an emotional prop in meetings (“I brought coffee = I care”)
• Take the place of breakfast, lunch, and boundaries
• Feel like a reward instead of a ritualised cry for help

Now it’s just warm disappointment.
You sip it like a spellbook you forgot how to read.

Let’s unpack the myth:

• You’re only valuable if you’re tired but caffeinated
• Rest is suspicious
• Hustle looks better when you accessorise it with a latte
• Holding coffee in public = doing something with your life
• Sleep is for people who don’t love their job enough
• Exhaustion is a personality trait

Coffee wasn’t complicit alone.
But it was the mascot.
The sainted brown liquid of underpaid miracle-makers.
The drug of choice for the respectable overthinker.
The reward you give yourself for surviving your own to-do list.

It’s a hard reckoning.

The projects are still late.
The emails are still emotionally hazardous.
The body is still begging for fruit and a slow morning.

But coffee?
Coffee just gives you heartburn and a false sense of control.

You sip it thinking:
“This’ll turn things around.”
Three sips later, you’re googling “how to fake competence during a personal collapse.”

Spoiler: that’s not in the coffee grounds.
That’s in your values.
Which are somewhere under the empty oat flat white.

• “I’m fine.” → Absolutely not.
• “I just need one more hour.” → That’s tomorrow’s grief, today.
• “I’m actually most productive under pressure.” → No, you’re just used to adrenaline as a lifestyle.
• “This is my last coffee.” → It was not.

Sometimes caffeine doesn’t wake you up.
It just gives your coping mechanisms subtitles.

• One full breath taken on purpose
• A 12-minute walk outside, where no one can ask you things
• Saying “no” out loud to a task with no spiritual return
• Lunch that involves chewing
• A playlist with precisely one song you hate enough to laugh at
• Emotional eye contact with a houseplant
• Pretending you’re being paid to rest, just for five minutes
• The sentence “I need five more hours and fewer expectations”

It’s not about quitting caffeine.
It’s about not asking beans to carry your entire life force.

Let’s talk about that.

It begins with one cup as a nudge.
Then two to clear the mental backlog.
Three to overcompensate for underresting.
And by cup four, you’re running on self-imposed deadlines and delayed vulnerability.

You drink coffee not to feel alert, but to feel like yourself.
Which would be fine…
Except the self you’re trying to resurrect is overbooked, underfed, and pretending the 3 p.m. panic is “focus.”

Caffeine can’t do the inner repair.
It can only play the soundtrack.
And eventually? Even that grows faint.

Maybe coffee isn’t broken.
Maybe you are just tired in ways it can’t touch.

Not sleep-tired.
Soul-tired.

And no amount of espresso can rewrite the fact that your schedule is a lie, your inbox is a psychological test, and your nervous system is staging a quiet coup.

So, drink the coffee, or don’t.
No shame. No sermon.

But maybe, just maybe, don’t give it a job it didn’t apply for.

You’re allowed to need more than caffeine.
You’re allowed to not be fixed by a hot beverage.
You’re allowed to rest and not apologise.

The beans weren’t meant to carry you.
You were.

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