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a side effect of the psychotic break is that we've been forced to confront our psychoactive drug use and how it affects our personality for better and for worse
the strange part is that that drug is caffeine, a drug so normalised that people don't even think of it as a drug
the UK has something called the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016, which defines a psychoactive substance as any substance "capable of producing a psychoactive effect", unless it is, specifically, caffeine, nicotine, tobacco, a medical product, or "ordinarily consumed as food"
it's fascinating going from being caffeine-dependent for a decade+ of our life to suddenly having an involuntary tolerance break and totally quitting the habit thereafter, because now when we do on occasion (once a week maybe) consume it, the effects can catch us off-guard
like many people we have an internalised stigma against being dependent on psychoactive substances, so slowly realising that a load-bearing part of our self-image has been, apparently, an effect of caffeine consumption, is ... Something, man. maybe that'll kill the stigma for us
one consequence of banning virtually all psychoactive substances for normal people is that it robs them of reference points to describe and understand what is going on in their brain. I'd love to tell you what the caffeine in our brain is doing but our vocabulary is very limited