Americans Don’t Run on Coffee — We Run on Fear

I woke up the other morning to Barry’s worried face hovering over the bed, coffee mug in one hand and his phone in the other. He glanced from the screen to me and the dog, still in a nest of winter blankets, and said, “Well, it looks like we’re at war with Iran.”

Suddenly it was as if the cold outside had moved inside me. I pulled the dog closer and told Barry I’d be down to make breakfast in a minute, filing the words “war with Iran” in the same mental drawer as all the other things I can’t control before coffee.

By the time I walked downstairs, Frisco at my heels, I noticed something that once would have been impossible for me: I wasn’t spiraling. I wasn’t reaching for my phone to doom‑scroll or mentally planning which closet to organize so I didn’t have to feel. I registered the words “war with Iran,” felt the heaviness in my chest, and made coffee, fed the dog, scrambled eggs.​

What shook me wasn’t just the news. It was the realization that I was meeting news like that with more steadiness than I ever had when my life looked “fine” on paper.

It’s not just one headline. A college friend, usually good for nothing more than gossip about old classmates, put his fork down over lunch recently and said, “It’s really scary out there. Don’t you feel it?” My cousin says it. Friends text, “What is going on out there?!” A woman who is active in our local business community and politics told me, “Karen, you have to come talk at the high school. These kids are scared.”

Everyone’s scared — and we’re all still expected to function.

I used to work for a man whose favorite question, in a very high‑stress, fast‑paced business, was, “Keeping it together?” I’d paste on the expected smile and answer, “Of course,” in my best falsely chipper voice, while my insides were tumbling and my secret alcoholism was getting worse by the week.

How many of us are less afraid of the headlines than we are of falling apart in front of each other—how many people are holding it together on the outside while the news, their bank account, their health, or their kids feel one bad day away from collapse? That’s when we reach for sugar and caffeine, alcohol, binge‑watching, scrolling, shopping—anything that promises a little vacation from our own nervous systems.​

Everybody jokes that America runs on coffee.Lately, it feels like America runs on fear.

The world has never been gentle

I keep reminding myself: this isn’t new. The world has never been a peaceful place. Entire communities have been driven from their homes. People have been tortured for their beliefs. Maps have been redrawn overnight. Fear has always been used as a weapon.

What’s different now is how constant it feels—how close it lives to our nervous systems. Today’s headlines just have different names: wars in new regions, secret files and lists, AI horror stories, an economy so many people are worried about that pollsters can measure the anxiety. Fear and worry in this country really are surging.

So the question for me isn’t, “Why is the world like this?” History has already answered that. The question that keeps tugging at me is quieter and more personal:

Why am I, of all people, calmer now than I have ever been?

The beautiful life I didn’t want

For most of my life, the outside looked better than the inside.

There was the historic colonial in a tony town, the Volvo wagon and pedigree dog, the house with ocean views, enough money in the bank that the manager would come out from behind his desk to greet me when I walked in. European vacations. Weekend getaways. (It sounds obnoxious. It’s also true.)​

And alongside all of that: chronic depression and antidepressants, a suicide attempt, a string of therapists and psychiatrists, sleep paralysis and night terrors, PTSD, and finally alcoholism. In that ocean‑view house with the wraparound deck, after a therapist crossed a line in a way that shattered me, I spent most of my time on the sofa, folded in on myself and isolated from the world.

The life looked beautiful. I did not want to be in it.​

So why am I calm now?

The rock bottom I didn’t want

The short answer is: I got a rock bottom I didn’t want and a wake‑up call I desperately needed. Here’s something a lot of people don’t know. I was depressed and suicidal long before I ever became a full‑blown alcoholic.

If I hadn’t crossed that last line with drinking, I could have stayed in quiet desperation for decades—high‑functioning, dying slowly. But there’s only so long you can drink a quart to half a gallon of vodka a day and pretend it’s sustainable. Eventually the choice really was: change, or die sooner than you think.​

Stopping drinking forced a different question. Not “How do I make my life look better?” but “What is this pain I keep trying to drown?”

In the rooms and in the Steps, I stopped treating alcohol as the problem and started seeing it as a symptom. The real work was looking at the stories underneath: the old terror, the shame, the beliefs that made my own mind feel like a hostile place to live.​

Over time, something shifted. The obsession to numb eased. The depression lifted. My nervous system stopped feeling like an enemy I had to fight. People around me noticed—not just that I wasn’t drinking, but that I was walking through real adversity, like Barry’s stage‑four diagnosis, with an ease and steadiness that made no sense on paper.​

They stopped asking, “How did you get sober?” and started asking, “How are you this okay?”

The people I want to be like

Some of the clearest answers I have didn’t come from books. They came from the people whose stories stayed lodged in my chest.

I once read about a rabbi in a concentration camp who found a kind of peace that had nothing to do with his circumstances—who stayed connected to his God in a place built to grind that out of him.

I heard about a man in my own recovery community whose child was killed in a terrible, avoidable accident. He went to his usual morning meeting the next day. People were stunned to see him. When he spoke about forgiving the person who caused the accident, someone asked how he could possibly forgive something like that. He said, softly, “I’ll forgive him one day. Why not start now?”​

Those are the people I want to be like.

When Barry once asked me why it’s so important to work on your emotional and spiritual life, this is what I meant. Not so you can be calm on a beach when everything is going your way, but so you have somewhere real to stand when the unthinkable happens—when the world does what it has always done, and the headline arrives at your own front door.​

I’ve had the “best of times”—beautiful homes, European cars, vacations, a bank manager who knew my name (and my balance)—and I was still depressed, medicated, in therapy, and awake at 3 a.m. wondering what was wrong with me. I’ve also had the “worst of times,” and there is not enough shopping, achievement, or distraction on earth to buy the peace of mind I have now.​

That peace came from facing what I used to numb.

Where the calm actually comes from

What changed wasn’t the news. It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t the state of the world. What changed was my relationship with my own inner life.

For years now, I’ve been doing the unglamorous work: telling the truth in rooms where other people tell theirs, looking at the stories underneath my reactions, sitting through feelings without instantly anesthetizing them, talking to a God of my understanding instead of to the latest headline.​

Eventually, I started writing down the way I walk myself back when fear takes over. I call it the RETURN Way—not because I needed a brand, but because that’s what it feels like: returning.

Returning to myself, to something larger than me, to a life that isn’t run entirely by my frightened mind. Those notes are becoming a workbook now, slowly making their way into the world, but they started as instructions to myself on how to stay sane while everything looks insane.​

So when Barry stands by the bed with the phone and says, “We’re at war with Iran,” my body still jolts. My stomach still drops. I still want to pull the covers over my head.

The difference is that there is now a small, practiced gap between what happens and what I decide it means. In that gap, I return. I pause long enough to notice the story my mind just told, the old fear it hooked into, the belief underneath it. I don’t argue with the fear. I just see it.​

And then I choose how I want to respond.

That practice doesn’t make war or loss or bad news disappear. It just means I don’t have to abandon myself every time something frightening happens. It’s what allows me, slowly, to become more like the people I admire—the rabbi who found peace in a camp, the father who said, “I’ll forgive him one day. Why not start now?”—people whose steadiness comes from somewhere deeper than circumstance.​

I can feel the fear without letting it decide who I am today.

A question for you, in a fearful time

If the world has always been dangerous—and it has—and if fear and worry really are higher right now than they’ve been in years, then maybe the better question isn’t, “How do we make life safe?” but, “Where am I building my sense of safety?”

Is it in the next headline, the next election, the next deposit, the next distraction?Or is it, slowly, stubbornly, in the part of you that can sit in a hard moment and still say, “I don’t have to live in terror of this”?

I don’t get to choose the times I live in. None of us do.But I do get to choose whether my entire life is dictated by whatever pops up on my phone before I’ve had my first sip of coffee.

If a woman who once planned her own exit can tell you she is the calmest she has ever been in one of the noisiest seasons of history, that is evidence that the peace we’re looking for was never out there to begin with.​

It’s in here.And it’s worth doing the work to find it.

❤️