Ages ago, in my early New York years, a close friend of mine told me about someone she knew who was doing a temporary internship in the city and wanted to know if I would get together with this person as a friendly face in a busy city. There’s a chance our paths may have crossed at another point in time—certainly many mutual friends—but it wasn’t someone I knew intimately.
When I met them at the coffee shop, I found that they’d ordered me a cup of black coffee. Unsure how I took it, they directed me to the station with cream and sugar.
Never before that day and never since have I had a cup of coffee.
I’m not a huge caffeine person—never drank soda growing up and mostly have gravitated to decaf or herbal teas as an adult (with an occassional early morning matcha latte thrown in as a special treat). But at this point in my life, pre-tea obsession, I don’t know if I’d ever had a caffeinated beverage.
Not wanting to be rude or appear ungrateful for the obviously kind gesture, I found myself sipping on a cup of black coffee and talking about my experiences in the city.
People are always surprised to learn I don’t drink coffee or much caffeine. “This energy is all natural, baby!” I joke. These exchanges are usually followed by a “really, never, ever?”
And I suppose it’s never ever with an asterisks. I once held my breath through 75% of a black coffee in a cafe I can’t remember with a mutual friend whose name has since left me.
Because that’s the kicker of all of this. So conditioned to be polite above all else, I struggled (yes, struggled) through a cup of black coffee just so as not to offend someone who I can’t even remember and who I surely have not spoken to since that day.
This is not a green light for inconsideration. I like that my default is to be accommodating and kind. But would there have been any real consequence to explaining that I don’t drink coffee, apologizing, and purchasing a peppermint tea? Probably not.
Nearly a decade later, I deeply feel the importance of speaking up for oneself in these little moments, in showing the people in our lives our truest self without apology.
Recently, my partner and I were talking to his sister about this terrible television show we watched that we both hated. As we went back and forth about how awful it was, she cut in to confirm that we had, indeed, finished the show. Before I could come up with a reasonable excuse, my partner cut in: “Yeah, she has a completion thing so since we started, we had to finish it.”
It wasn’t said with an eye roll. It wasn’t said with judgment. It was said as obviously as any established fact about me: “she was born in Virginia; she has brown eyes; she doesn’t drink coffee.” It was wholly and honestly accepted.
Perhaps the bravest thing we can do is show each other our true selves.
Perhaps we don’t have to live a thousand miniature deaths each day pretending to be someone we aren’t.
If we are lucky enough to be able to spend intentional time learning who we are and what we want and why we move through the world as we do, the best thing we can do is let others into that truth. And if we are truly lucky, we will find people on the other side, loving us through each eccentricity, herbal tea in hand.
Comments