Confession of a Coffee-Totaller

I have a confession to make: I'm addicted to not drinking coffee.

I started out not drinking coffee very young. My parents let me not drink coffee from a very young age. Too young, perhaps, for me to handle responsibly.

Since then, I have not drunk coffee every day, sometimes four or five times a day, or even more.

I've been worrying about this problem for some time. For one thing, not drinking coffee separates me from the vast majority of my fellow Israelis who are not similarly addicted. For another, this habit has led to other addictions, such as drinking tea and even ingesting pure coffee-free substances, such as water (sometimes straight-up, out of the bottle).

Only recently have I begun to seriously consider breaking myself from this addiction.

I've tried to cut down my not drinking coffee to only a few times per day. In some instances, I even made myself a cup of coffee and drank it, but then I went back to not drinking it several more times that day.

It's hard work. Coffee has a lovely smell, but when it comes down to it, even with sugar and milk it tastes like bitter boiled beans. So the allure of breaking the not coffee drinking habit is a hard hill to climb.

I'm almost up to once a week now, and I think I probably won't be able to do much better than that for a while.

Let my example serve as a warning to my readers: once you start with an addictive habit, such as not drinking coffee, you may only discover too late that you have a long road to breaking the addiction.

Stay warm and dry,
Yehuda