In an ideal world, the first flush of green tea leaves—the initial tiny leaves tentatively unfurling as the tea plant thinks it’s finally warm enough to peek out—are picked on a daily basis, little buds of green that are treated with care and delicacy, so they don’t break, processed, and sent off as the freshest of all possible teas, to be drunk within weeks.

 

Those first, incredibly fresh green teas are about to show up. I get mine from white2tea.com, where the deal is that green teas show up for about a week sometime around mid-March for preorder while they’re processing. 

 

Once they’re done, they’re DONE, no more green teas (at least not from white2tea) for another year.

 

Of course, what that means is that THIS green tea is almost a year old. I got my order of fresh green teas sometime around April, and happil worked through most of them. The key is MOST of them: this one fell to the bottom of my “tea to drink immediately” container and I just found it while rooting around, and thought that I had better drink it before the new fresh green teas came in so I had an excuse to stock up on fresh green teas.

One of the things that is visually cool about this tea is that the leaves are so small, and the little stem at the bottom so comparatively heavy, that they stand up at the bottom of the tea pot, waving around like living fronds of seaweed every time you pick up the pot.

 

The taste was… Let’s just say, it’s best described as “oh no!”

 

I have nobody but myself to blame, for two reasons.

 

First, the whole “letting fresh tea sit for ten months” thing. And secondly, I kind of messed it up. As you can see from the pictures above, I put in a gong fu amount of tea (about 5 g) in the teapot, but then brewed it in the very lazy fashion of letting the tea sit and pouring off drafts here and there, and so of course it was Too Much for me: too full, too rich, and bitter enough that the taste scraped at the roof of my mouth while simultaneously punching me directly in the sinuses.

 

For a little while, I thought about not posting this at all because what was I going to say? “This tea might be good, but I wasn’t paying attention when I brewed it and also I forgot it existed for ten months.” Ha! Some tea newsletter that would be.

 

But after contemplating my errors, I decided to revisit the tea the next day, this time with the appropriate tea to water ratio.

 

I can now report that when you brew this tea properly, even when it’s ten months old, it’s silky, smooth, and delicate. Perhaps even slightly understated—but again, it’s ten months old.

Emerald buds comes from white2tea. You can’t purchase it now, but it’ll probably pop up in a couple of weeks, so if you want to haunt the website and/or sign up for the newsletter to get fresh fresh green teas, now is the time.

So a part of my persistent life story is that when I am avoiding something, I have a tendency to find the worst methods of avoidance.

 

This is not always bad for me in the long run. For instance, I started writing romance novels because I was clerking for a terrible federal judge and I needed a part of the day where I was literally doing anything other than thinking about him. Nothing I wrote during that time was publishable, but I did write.

 

But it is sometimes bad for me.

 

When I was a brand new adult, I got into a fancy college that I couldn’t afford, scraped together enough money over the summer to pay for the first semester of that college after begging financial aid to let me get the maximum amount of loans and work-study, and was faced with the inevitable certainty that (a) I couldn’t afford the second semester, and (b) even if I did, two of my older sisters and my mother were going to graduate college the next year and my fathers expected family contribution was going to triple, which was not good because he wasn’t paying the full expected amount for any of them. What was an unaffordable reach in year one was going to turn into a gigantic fuckton of impossible very soon.

 

There are many ways a rational person could deal with this. They could, for instance, have not gone to that particular university. (In retrospect, this is obviously what I should have done.) They could try to scrape together scholarships and financial aid. They could try to leverage connections to get summer jobs that would pay better than the absolute nonsense I had dealt with the prior summer. (One of my friends mentioned, off hand, that her friend’s mom let her work at the bank over Christmas break and she’d made a thousand dollars and I felt the most intense wave of pained jealousy in that moment that I have ever felt in my life about anything, ever). 

 

In my defense, I did have a plan to pay for the second semester. It went like this: take the smallest meal plan they would let me take (which was 10 meals a week). Make meals in the dorms for the rest of the time. Do my allotted work-study, and save enough to make up the shortfall on my next semester’s tuition, which I could barely accomplish if I (a) did not spend a single dime on anything, and how that was going to work with me making meals for myself, I did not really calculate, and (b) did not have to pay taxes on my earnings, which, in retrospect, whoops. This is what happens when you’re eighteen and don’t understand anything.

 

In any event, I returned to campus the second semester having not actually paid what I owed the university for THAT semester, and feeling absolutely overwhelmed by what was going to be owed for the next supposed three years.

 

Instead of trying to come up with a solution, I found a video game online where the first level was free, and played it over and over for weeks on end. I skipped almost all of my classes. 

 

I didn’t tell anyone what was happening, because I did not know how to do that. I’d built myself up as this super-strong person who could do anything, including figuring out how to manage the impossibility of paying for something I couldn’t pay for. I didn’t want to admit that I was wrong.

 

So instead of doing anything rational, I downloaded a game that made the first level free and then you had to send a check off to the address at the end (that’s early 1995 internet for you!) to get the full game, and I didn’t have any money to send to whomever made the game, so I played that first level over and over and over for about six weeks. I played it so that I could finish it as fast as possible; I played it so I could finish as throughly as possible. I played it so that I would just go back and forth from room to room and kill monsters. I was logging something like eighty hours a week playing that single level of that ridiculous game.

 

I also did not go to the classes I wasn’t paying for. At some point over spring break, my dad called me and was like, “so, I keep getting notices from school that you haven’t paid tuition” and I was like “oh no, they told you!” And we had a talk and I admitted that I had no idea what I was doing and was a complete mess and he bought me a plane ticket home and I left a letter for my roommate that there was a family emergency and I had to leave and I still feel badly about lying to her, but I’m pretty sure she knew that I was the family emergency since we were taking one of those classes I wasn’t attending together.

 

I did not tell anyone in the administration that I had left, and so I just got failing grades in everything.

 

It is now almost exactly thirty years since that happened to me, and I have managed to forgive myself for the shame I felt, for that horrific feeling that everything was going wrong and I was doing it to myself, and how it got worse and worse, and the worse it got the harder I tried not to pay attention to the rising tide of self-recrimination.

 

I say this because a few days ago, I downloaded Civilization VI for the iPad, and my current headache is because I spent all of yesterday—literally from 10 AM until long after my husband went to sleep, with a break for dinner but not lunch or, like, basic hydration—playing it. My head hurts. My eyes hurt. My back hurts. I’m too old to do this shit.

 

Sometime around 12:45 last night, I stood up, got something to drink, got ready for bed, and said to myself, “yes, this game needs to be deleted from my iPad.” So I did that and stumbled into bed.

 

When I was younger, I yearned to be a different person when I grew up—a better person, one who didn’t make stupid mistakes and didn’t hyperfocus on stupid games when there were so many other things out there that desperately needed my attention. I wanted to be the rational person I imagined in my head: someone strong, who didn’t let anything faze her.

 

I am almost fifty years old, and I’m still doing the thing I did at eighteen. I am still not rational.

 

But now, I can ask for help. I can tell my husband that I need to delete the game, and he will listen. I can take stock the next day and ask myself what it is that I’m avoiding so assiduously. (I’m gonna vaguely gesture at the entire world, if you’re wondering.) I can make a list of the things I can do, and I can get them done.

 

Most of all, I can forgive myself. I don’t need to tell myself how badly I suck and then whimper and go through great lengths to distract myself from how much I suck. I am a more loving person to myself, and that is what has made my life better.

 

I haven’t changed who I am, not in any fundamental way. I still make the same mistakes. But I’ve learned to interrupt the cycle of shame about my missteps, and that’s made all the difference.

 

So if you’re wondering why I tried the tea again, but this time doing it right? That’s why.

This has been Courtney's Weekly Tea, a weekly newsletter about tea, books, and everything else. If you don't want to receive this email, or do want to receive additional emails about Courtney's books/book events/etc, please use the links below to unsubscribe from this list or to manage your mailing list preferences.