I’ve heard people say you know you’re an alcoholic when you start drinking in the morning. This isn’t true, you might just be at a bachelorette party. Plus, plenty of alcoholics don’t drink in the morning. Some don’t even wake up until noon.
And I do have some personal experience with the morning issue, as I’m a recovering alcoholic who never drank in the mornings and never slept until noon. There’s a risk to defining an addiction with such specific criteria. It’s inaccurate. It’s an oversimplification. It’s hyperbolic. It creates both false panic and false calm. Panic for those who engage in the behavior, calm for those don’t meet the specific definition, but might still have a problem.
If there’s no single behavior that defines an addict, then perhaps it’s safe to say there’s no single substance, either. It’s an idea I’ve been pondering in the zombie-like month since I quit drinking Celsius.
I got into energy drinks during the pandemic. Maybe the boredom drove me to them. One day, in an exhausted, weak moment at a 7-Eleven, I thought, “I’ll switch it up. I’ll live life. I’ll take a dare. I’ll buy a drink the self-checkout system alerts the cashier about.” And so, I got a Red Bull.
I didn’t suffer the negative side effects associated with such beverages. I’m too low-energy to get the jitters (one jitter, max). You wouldn’t have known I just consumed 200 mg of caffeine in six minutes. I have a theory that the people who seem like they drink a ton of Red Bull don’t drink any Red Bull. They don’t need it. It’s the quiet overworkers. Those of us who live life on the boundary of asleep and awake. We’re the ones chugging 5-hour energy.
So what did happen? I felt great. Mood boost in a can. Which is how I once felt about alcohol, before quitting for good.
I didn’t go back the very next day, but I did start to dip my toes in. I slowly expanded my taurine-palate. After Red Bull, there was C4 and Rockstar and any of the soda-brand energy drinks and anything marketed as organic. I never touched Bang or Monster (we all have to draw the line somewhere). Celsius became my favorite. So many fruity flavors, it was like drinking a salad, arguably. I mean, there was a cucumber one. So refreshing. And the options! Carbonated vs uncarbonated! Actually, that was the only option. But it’s big one.
Daytime Celsii made way for nighttime Celsii, if I had something important to do. I’m a stand up comedian, and I often took the stage with a Celsius in hand. Humiliating; I wasn’t even being sponsored. Drinking one became nothing at all. It was no longer a guaranteed mood boost, it was just a necessity to ward off a nap.
I was never under any illusion that energy drinks were good for me, but in my mind, they were really just a better coffee. I didn’t think they were any worse than what I already put in my body. I eat a lot of processed food; it’s an occupational hazard of being alive. Was there a difference between Pop Chips, Diet Coke, Quest Bars, and Celsius? They all were all part of the “hydrogenated xantham” family, as far as I could tell. Maybe Celsius disrupted my sleep, but I never sleep well anyway. Plus, it was a solution to insomnia, too. The rare problem that solves itself.
And the benefits abounded. Energy drinks are portable, inexpensive, and widely available. I used to spend subway rides dreading my stop, as I’d have to open my eyes. But once I started drinking Celsius, I only had to get myself from the train to the nearest bodega. Never more than a five minute walk; God Bless NYC.
Celsius gave me a sense of safety. No matter how exhausted I was, in the two hours after drinking one, I couldn’t fall asleep. But as the years passed, safety gave way to shame. For one thing, Celsius is trashy. Something about going into a gas station to buy a Celsius seemed like asking a friend if they wanted to stop for Kit-Kats for lunch (which I have done. We all have). Celsius isn’t like coffee or wine; you can’t really be an connoisseur, at least not in polite company. Besides, we all know cucumber is the best.
But trashy isn’t bad—the shame was less about Celsius itself than what it suggested about me. I wasn’t reserving Celsii for all-nighters; I had grown to rely on it to have fun. The behaviors started to concern me: chugging one on the street before parties, drinking one in the MetroNorth bathroom on my way to meet my boyfriend’s parents, wondering when I could duck out of a social engagement to grab one without anyone seeing. I worried people would judge me—not for the drink itself, but for needing it. And what was so broken inside of me that I found it hard to go to a party? Why didn’t I have it in me to be alone, even when I was too tired to be around anyone? I guess maybe this is the whole premise of cocaine.
As the shame wore on, my rationalizations for Celsius’ safety started to wear thin. I have this fear that I’ll one day get diagnosed with a terminal illness, and my doctor will be like, “your test results say it’s because of the Diet Coke and extreme iPhone usage.” It’s not something I’ve ever seen or heard happen, but I have an active imagination. Anyway, I had a sense that I didn’t want to wake up one day and realize I’d drank a Celsius every day for the last forty years.
So, I decided to make a change. I figured maybe I’d try to become a rare Celsius-er; reserve it for special occasions. Easier said than done, because once you start thinking about it, you realize how truly precious each day is. It’s all special occasions all the time in my house!
But I didn’t think cutting down on Celsius should be that hard. I would still drink coffee, after all. As much as I wanted, no limits. After a big work project wrapped, I decided to take a week off the energy drinks. It was much harder than I expected, which only inspired me to keep going. The difficulty made the act of quitting feel more monumental, more satisfying, more necessary. After a week of brain fog, I didn’t want to give up all my hard work. I had to quit entirely.
And I did, and it was hard, and it continues to be hard. And yet, I’m inclined not to think I was addicted to Celsius. I don’t think it would mess up anything about my life if I drank a Celsius today; I might not even come back to edit this post, if I already had it scheduled.
But the same can be said of my alcohol abuse. Would it ruin my life if I had a glass of wine today? Probably not. I don’t think I’m in the bucket of people who can’t ever have another drink ever again, which means perhaps I wasn’t in the category of people with an addiction. But I didn’t find my drinking normal, either. There’s a risk to milder problems—sometimes, we don’t begin to solve something until it’s destroying our lives.
This goes beyond Celsius or booze—it’s a problem with how we talk about addiction in general. As though it’s a binary; as though there are addicts and normies. As though you must defend your decision to leave; as though you must argue that staying was not an option. One of my favorite writers Laura McKowen once wrote of substance abuse that the question isn’t if it’s bad enough to leave. The question is whether it’s good enough to stay.
It helps me to imagine I’ll never drink another Celsius; it wasn’t good enough for me to keep it up. It’s freeing to not need it, just like it’s freeing to not need alcohol. It doesn’t always matter if something falls into the bucket of “addiction.” Sometimes, it does: for health-insurance reasons, or medical reasons. And sometimes it’s a useful term; it helps people understand themselves, or helps them to better explain what they’re going through to loved ones, or even express the severity to a skeptical loved one. But that’s really just sometimes.
Rather than always talking about substance abuse in terms of whether or not somebody needs to stop, what if sometimes spoke about what benefits there were to be gained. What if we looked at sobriety as a positive choice rather than a negative punishment. What if we considered that in many cases, the easiest way to manage a substance—even one you’re not addicted to—is to eliminate it.
And the very act of quitting anything has benefits. You get to know yourself better. That’s why it’s hard. You have to work out a new way of being. If ever I had a free afternoon, I used to drink a Celsius and walk NYC for about five hours listening to an audiobook, stopping to eat every hour or so. But to realize that I don’t have the energy for a five-hour walk without a Celsius is to acknowledge that perhaps I never did.
So, here I am, a tired, Celsius-free lady. When I quit drinking, there was nothing more annoying than someone trying to relate to me by telling me they “didn’t really drink.” To me, that’s the least relatable. I related much more to people who drank all the time. And this morning, I saw myself in a woman double-fisting a Celsius and a yoga mat. She was trying to fit it all in. But maybe she can. And maybe she wants to. And maybe she doesn’t drink energy drinks in a sad way; maybe they’re entirely uplifting for her, and there’s no reason for her to rethink it. Just because it’s the morning doesn’t mean she has a problem.