Make Ye Your Little Coffees, Free Ye Your Souls

The at-home latte as an act of reclamation, and other creative practices

The girlies are making Brown Sugar Shaken espressos. They are making Honey Cinnamon matchas. They are making Blueberry Syrup, Salted Vanilla, and Banana Cream lattes.

They make them in check-capped Bonne Maman jars, wide French Wecks, Middle America 40 oz glass tumblers from Amazon. They make them with protein powder, oat milk, electric frothers, pebbled ice, homemade simple syrup.

The girlies are making.

What and how they make matters naught.

The girlies are making.

I started my first job when I was 13. I lied (ever so slightly) about my age so I could sling coffee in my local café with my friends, who’d all turned the requisitory 14-years-old months before me.

Just to let you know: I hated being a barista.

My face always felt greasy, clogged with oily espresso spores. My hands were dry and cracked from constant washing, dipping, and rag-handling. I reeked of coffee and not in the nice way that Midwestern home décor store candles think coffee smells, but a burnt, bitter scent, not without a whiff of pepperoni from the frozen stuffed pretzels we served.

I hated the precision of coffee. Like baking, barista-ing requires a sub-passion for chemistry and mathematics. Steamed milk must be X degrees hot. We served 20 oz lattes with shots in triplicate and by 13, I’d largely given up on multiplication on digits greater than, I don’t know…2?

The inner doors of our coffee shop cabinets were pasted with instructions for various smoothie and espresso recipes, equations I dreaded tripling or doubling when an extra-large order came in. I can no longer remember what combination of DaVinci syrups made what drink, but I can remember some of the names:

Bahama Mama. Scooby Doo. Turtle.

What I did like about working at the coffee shop was the supreme feeling of power, authority, and personhood, because in a Nebraskan town of 6,000, there aren’t many places one can go except the local coffee shop.

In fact, even on the days I wasn’t working behind the counter, I’d end up at the cafe. The shop neighbored the dance studio, a convenient pit-stop after dropping my sister off at tap lessons. If I was heading to a friend’s house to sit in their basement and cry about boys, I’d get lattes first (how very SATC of us? Kind of?). For years, it was either get coffee or roam aimlessly around the Walmart (which, obviously, we did, as soon as the coffee shop shuttered doors at 5:30 pm).

Sidney, Nebraska did not have a mall (the aforementioned Walmart opened about a year prior to my falsifying my age to work at aforementioned coffee shop) and on a quiet Saturday afternoon, the thing to do was go to the coffee shop, get a coffee, drink that coffee.

Consumption was certainly a treat, but it was also a band-aid for boredom. It’s indicative of a larger cultural movement, because if I – a 15-year-old girl in Sidney, Nebraska – could treat “getting a little coffee” with such laisse-faire-ity in 2009, what did that say about America-at-Large?

That we really don’t know what to do with ourselves except consume.

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There’s a meme out there I love. It’s simple, a sped-up shot of a person in a car drinking an iced latte and the caption overtop says something like, I don’t know how to explain to you that my hobby is just buying a little treat or my red flag is spending $30 every time I leave the house.

A good meme hits home because it’s true (except in this economy, it’s more like a solid $45 comes out of my pocket every time I go out in the word). When I’m bored, sad, or discomforted, my autopilot directs me to the nearest Target or Home Goods if I’m feeling chaotic evil, an independent bookstore or thrift outlet if I’m feeling lawful good. And always, always, to a café.

There are thought pieces out there aplenty dealing with our obsessive need to spend and consume, particularly if you slap the “self-care” label on it. What I want to offer here is not another take on How Capitalism Eats at Our Foundational Insecurity & Fear to Validate Its Own Existence, but rather, to offer a sign of hope:

The girlies and their at-home coffees.

Maybe your feed looks a little different than mine, so let me tell you what I’m seeing: coffee in jars, typically made by a woman in her late-twenties/early-thirties, who has invested in some kind of espresso machine and a supply of colorful glass straws. More often than not, the drinks are iced, and the video begins with a satisfying ASMR glass-straw-stir or capped-jar-shake. Nothing groundbreaking at a first scroll…until you consider the tone of these videos.

Because making coffee at home is nothing new. It’s the joy of making which feels refreshing.

In the current era of recession-core, it’d be easy to position the making of coffee (as opposed to buying it out at a coffee shop) as a budget hack. Ditch your $12 lattes and let me show you how to make your Starbucks at home! Likewise, I’ve scrolled through countless Eat-This-Not-That-inspired videos, “healthy home coffee swap recipes” that promise to save on sugar intake without compromising on flavor.

There’s no pang of scarcity mindset with these girlies and their coffee. The joy and enthusiasm of creating for creation’s sake makes this content so moreish.

I suppose this speaks to a larger trend in social media over the last…forever: that these platforms largely depend on the viewer’s low self-worth to maintain their prevalence. Aspirational content is only as successful as those of us aspiring – to be wealthier, skinnier, have fuller social lives, straighter noses, deeper partnerships, more expansive closets. All in an attempt that this both impossible and attainable aspirational future.

Creating for creation’s sake, on the other hand, is an act of grounding and presence. You are in the moment, making. Experiencing what unfolds on the page, in the pot, from your closet, in your mug in real time – particularly considering a moment as small as your morning coffee. This isn’t the Sistine Chapel. There is nothing to aspire to here that could potentially damage your sense of self (at least, I write this in hopes that one’s less-than-delicious homemade maple latte isn’t deeply damaging their sense of self).

On that note (and here I promised this wouldn’t be an essay about How Capitalism Eats at Our Foundational Insecurity & Fear to Validate Its Own Existence!), the act of creating moments of joy as opposed to purchasing them is a reclamation, of sorts. It’s a small, but important, step towards empowerment: I can do this myself. I don’t need to buy the band-aid.

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I’ve been slowly working this idea into my day-to-day. As you WELL know by now, I’m trying to spend less time mindlessly consuming (be that wandering around a Target or doomscrolling), and more time creating.

I need to caveat the creating.

It’s creating without purpose, without expectation. I’ve written before about the pressure I put on my writing and as someone who still holds out that this could be my livelihood one day, I’m opting for other forms of creativity that aren’t so loaded. Morning pages help, and doodling is a big one. Lately, when I’m feeling listless on a Sunday afternoon, I just open my journal to a blank page and color. It’s a moment in my day that’s separate from productivity, comparison, and anxiety.

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In the U.S. alone, women are responsible for 85% of consumer spending. Regardless of whether they act as sole earner or not, women largely make spending decisions for the household. It’s not just the day-to-day, such as what brands to buy at the grocery store or where the back-to-school shopping takes place. Women also purchase over 70% of traditionally “male” products, such as automobiles and automobiles.

I mention this because I want to highlight that what women do matters. It matters in a very material, economic sense. (Although after the summer of 2023, which saw the trifold powers of Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie herald in the girl economy, I hope this isn’t a surprise to anyone).

And if the girlies are making coffee at home, joyfully, we’d best pay attention. Because this could be the start of a new paradigm – creation over consumption.

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