I was late almost every day of my senior year of high school. I’d wake up ten minutes after seven and watch the clock change through gummy eyes. When I finally dragged myself to the icy bathroom, I’d try and fail to put my frozen contacts in with shivering hands. When I finally came downstairs, slit-eyed against the bright kitchen lights, my mother would sigh and repress her usual reprimand. Before I slipped out the front door to face my unscraped windshield, Mom would hand me a travel mug of hot English breakfast tea with cream. “I love you, drive safely,” she’d say. I’d arrive ten minutes after seven thirty, having gone ten over the speed limit with one eye closed against the glare of the sun.

         When humans are faced with extreme, sudden stressors, our sympathetic nervous systems trigger a release of adrenaline, cortisol, and epinephrine, spiking our heart rates and dilating our pupils. The peripheral bodily functions, like digestion and the immune system, slow, and the surplus of energy prepares us for sudden, violent action. Our ears ring, and we must make the split-second decision on the best course of action for survival. Scientifically, this is called the acute stress response, but we know it best as the “fight-or-flight response.”
         In my last track meet of seventh grade, I ran the third-fastest girls’ 400-meter time in the state of Colorado. Track always made me nervous. In the moments before the gun sounded, I’d feel sick with fear, staring at my feet braced in the dusty gravel of the track. My vision would darken around the edges and my heart would feel heavy, each beat sounding through my echoing chest as if shouting its dread to my brain. I’d shift my sight up, looking for the puff of smoke in the air, because with the ringing in my ears, I didn’t trust myself to hear the gun.
         When it finally sounded, I’d flinch and force myself to push off the line. My legs would drag for the first hundred meters, like I was wading through six inches of sand. By the time we reached the 200-meter mark, the nerves would wear off; my heart would then concentrate on the task at hand. I’d look around at my competitors as we rounded the third curve, wondering if they were as miserable as I was, but they wouldn’t seem interested in commiserating. I don’t remember ever losing a race. In high school, I switched to team sports.
         In the West African country of Senegal, there are two ways to drink coffee. The first is instant, with piping hot water and powdered milk. The second is called Café Touba, named after the largest religious hub in the country. It’s heavily sweetened and spiced with cloves and Selim pepper, and it tastes a little
bit like drinking hot Listerine, but not in a bad way.
         I stopped playing in piano recitals at some point through middle school. Just the mental image of sitting at a Steinway in front of my peers and their parents, trying to hear the Beethoven through the ringing of my own ears, sent my heart racing like I was lined up for a 400. At my last recital, I’d forced my shaking fingers through the first half of Bach’s Minuet in G before losing my focus and having to start over. My mom sat next to me on the stairs when I finally told her, through a thick layer of snot, that I hated performing. “Oh, that’s all?” She asked with a little laugh, “You don’t have to do them. You just had to tell me.”
         When I was young, probably seven or eight years old, we heard a rumor about a boy who’d died taking too many caffeine pills before a wrestling match. My older brother told me his heart had exploded. I eyed the baristas at my local coffee shop when my mom would take us in for Italian sodas and wondered if they knew they were dealers of death. In sixth grade, my friends and I went into that same coffee shop, and I ordered a café au lait, because I wanted to look cool against the vanilla steamers and hot chocolates they liked. That night, I lay awake until three, mystified and distressed at my own pounding heart.
         In fourth grade, I won my class spelling bee, which qualified me to participate in the school-wide competition. On the day of, I stood with the other class winners in the biting cold of the cafeteria, dressed in a new green shirt. A mass of students sat on the floor before us, the competitors’ parents leaning against the back walls. I went up for my first word, "corner". My heart had never beat so fast, my vision never so blurred with fear. “C-O-R,” I began, and then immediately doubted myself. My hands went cold and shivery, and I tried to unclench them from my jeans. I hated whatever path of victory I’d taken that led me to this point. What letter had I said last? C? “O,” I said, then, “Can I go back?”
         At the end of the school day, I sat on a bench next to the playground, waiting for my mom and contemplating my failure. A boy I’d never seen before stopped in front of me. “Hey,” he said. “You did really well.” Later, my mom told me, “It’s okay, because you actually spelled "coroner," which is a much harder word.”
         Even now, having passed fourth grade, I lose my ability to multitask when I’m stressed or nervous. I envy my peers for their ability to compartmentalize, to say, “it’s not productive to think about this right now, focus on the task at hand.” A single “can we talk?” text sends my heart into fits, sets my brain on a singular track of worst-case-scenarios that can’t be derailed until it’s seen closure. The starting gun for a track meet still gives me shivers, turns my muscles cold. The word “coroner” still makes me think of that frozen, grey cafeteria, trying to focus on the red blur of my mother’s winter jacket against the back wall.
         My first real relationship took two and a half years to end. Sometime after, I went home for dinner and fought with my mother, who was worried about whether I was sleeping enough. To apologize, she drove me home and helped me change the sheets on my bed. That weekend, my dad texted me, and we went to his favorite café in Denver to talk about anything but my breakup. He got a pour over and drank it black. I got a Vietnamese, satisfyingly over-sweet and coated in cinnamon.
         When we drink caffeine, our bodies release adrenaline, cortisol, and epinephrine, the same hormones that trigger our fight-or-flight response. Our blood vessels constrict, our hearts race and our minds can focus more easily. The average adult human can safely consume up to 400 mg of caffeine per day, but over time, we develop a tolerance and need to consume greater quantities for the same effect.
         I try to keep my tolerance very low: a cup of tea a day through high school and most of college, a rare cappuccino on test days or for hangovers. In high school, a friend of mine drank two quad-shot caramel lattes a day. Her system was constantly flooded with caffeine and sugar, and her backpack rattled with spare change and anxiety medications. I’d give her the Starbucks Rewards stickers off the Costco-sized bags of coffee beans my parents would buy, hoping to relieve the fifteen-dollar-per-day burden on her bank account.
         There have been over eight thousand episodes of Jeopardy! aired to date, the last 36 years of which have been hosted by Alex Trebek. In a recent interview, Trebek confessed feelings of deep depression while undergoing treatment for pancreatic cancer. But he says his job helps him keep going, because it wakes him up. [1]
         At least once a week, my roommates and I gather in front of the television and binge on recorded episodes of Jeopardy! until one of us gives up and goes to bed. We shout our mostly incorrect answers, and we have a house rule that if someone needs extra time to answer the question before the timer goes off, we pause it until they settle on an answer. I watch the competitors sweat under the bright studio lights, their hands shaking on the little remotes, and I’m glad I’m here, comfortable and warm in my living room, with a pause button and no public humiliation if I get a wrong answer.
         In Senegal, tea is served after dinner in a series of three small glasses, each round sweeter and stronger than the last. The leaves are a mixture of peppermint and Chinese green tea, mixed with sugar and poured back and forth between two pots to develop a froth. It’s considered a useful social tool, good for making visitors comfortable.
         I barely slept my first week in Dakar. The mosquitoes slipped through the gaps in my curtains, ravaged my exposed arms, and swelled the space above my left eye. On my third day, I acquired a mosquito net, which I rigged up from the corner of the wardrobe using the handle of a spray bottle and a heavy book. Over the next couple of days, the itching slowed, and my eyebrow returned to its normal size, but I still found myself wide awake into the early morning. When I learned to politely decline the third glass of tea, I began to sleep better.
         After every Hanukkah dinner with my relatives in Massachusetts, my uncle Eric takes drink orders and spends the next twenty minutes distributing cups of hot Irish breakfast tea and black coffee, which we are free to augment with cream according to our own Kosher preferences. We sit around the packed table, starting conversations and debates while we wait for our mugs to cool. My younger Jewish cousins make a beeline for the playroom, because hot chocolate is made off-limits by the presence of milk. I always ask for decaf tea, because the time change already makes it hard enough to sleep when we visit.

         My father loves coffee, which is lucky, because he also loves staying up late. It’s a trait we share. Our brains work best between the hours of 11 PM and 2 AM, as if we’d just finished a fresh pot. When I come home to visit, the two of us will sit in comfortable silence for hours every night in the spotty light of the floor lamps, until he gets up, stretches, and gives the cat a last kiss on the forehead. One of us will ask, “Wanna drink coffee and stay up all night?” And the other will laugh, because of course we do. The comfort of the night is somehow purer than the light of the day. But if we never go to bed, we don’t get to drink the first morning coffee.

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[1]Proto, Dominick, Angeline Jane Bernabe, and Cameron Harrison. 2020. "Alex Trebek Shares Details of Experimental Treatment for Cancer Battle". Good Morning America. https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/ culture/story/alex-trebek-opens-battle-cancer-experimental-treatment- memoir-71872701.