For anyone with an anxiety disorder, surgery can be a special kind of hell. Consider anesthesia: a numbing of our consciousness that’s beyond our own control.

There are so many variables in any given day that can effect my physiological arousal — not just caffeine, but sleep, weather, exercise, and so on — that it’s pretty difficult to detect when coffee alone is the culprit.

Karl, the coffee shop owner, said that I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between half-decaf and fully-caffeinated Americano. The difference, he said, was so slight. GAME ON, KARL.

Six cups of Americano. Six different days. Six different opportunities for me to blindly guess the caffeine content of each drink.

I’m always on the lookout for people who share their mental health stories both openly and eloquently, and Salome Tibebu is one of those people. She recently spoke about her OCD at a TEDx event in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area.

“I had told a friend of mine [at school] that I felt like dying, and had a plan to kill myself. She told one of the teachers, and they said the school couldn’t handle me anymore.”