Cigarettes are a lot like squirrels. They are perfectly harmless until you put one in your mouth and light it on fire.

When I was a kid, I cut a list out of the newspaper and stuffed it in my mom’s purse, in the snap-top leatherette case where she kept her Newport 100s. The list was all the ways your body would repair itself after you quit smoking. Something like the image below, from the WebMD website (though the 1970s was firmly in the pre-infographics era.)

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In twenty minutes, your pulse and blood pressure drop back to normal. In twelve hours, your carbon monoxide levels are normal. At two-three days, the nerve endings giving you your sense of smell and taste are starting to heal. Your lungs kick out grody stuff. Energy and breathing improve. Over the next year, it only gets better and heart attack risk falls. After 5 years, 10 years, 15… your cancer and heart disease risks fall dramatically.

Smoke stacked

I grew up in a smokier time, and in a smoky household. I hated being in a car with Mom when she smoked. I had to ask her to open a window! Can you imagine that today? I remember flying together in the smoking section of a Frontier flight. There was cowboy-print wallpaper on the bulkhead. I begged her, harangued her, to quit, that day and many others.

Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.

My aunts and uncles and their spouses – smokers all – would sit around one or another kitchen table setting the world to rights. They were there for each other, with a cigarette in their hands. It was as normal and natural as seeing them blink, or seeing them eat potato salad off a paper plate on the Fourth of July.

Of course, they probably would have been able to do all that good stuff with and for each other a lot longer, had they been able to quit.

They weren’t my only smoking role models. Smoking was everywhere back then, public and private spaces, on TV and in the movies, among celebrities and everyone just walking and driving around. We had smoking and non-smoking sections in restaurants, which seems absurd today. Advertising for cigarettes was everywhere, and the ads were indistinguishable from the ones for perfume or travel or clothing or cars.

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Smoking is very bad for you and should only be done because it looks so good. People who don’t smoke have a terrible time finding something polite to do with their lips. (P.J. O’Rourke)

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Schnucks should tighten controls on their cigarette machine

In the summer before the start of junior high, my friend – I’ll call her LL – and I went to the grocery store with a pocketful of quarters. We felt we needed to be “ready” in case the cool kids at our new school asked us to smoke. We walked back and forth near the grocery store entrance for about an hour, surreptitiously dropping quarters into the cigarette machine. Pulled the handle. And snuck a pack of Marlboro Reds out to a dry riverbed in Dunegant Park, where we smoked all 20, straight through. We posed like the women in the ads, like my mom and my aunties, showing how adult, how hip we were.

LL and I should have been easily caught and punished. We must have smelled like an ashtray. But this was the 70s, and we had a lot of freedom. Plus, back when everyone smoked, noses were not as attuned to it, like we are today.

I don’t know about LL, but none of the cool kids ever asked me to smoke.

And I would have said No if they had

Despite that one junior-high moment of madness, I hated smoking so much, there was no way I’d ever take it up. Then I left home, home left me, college started… I’m going to call those couple of years fraught, and state without fear of contradiction that that time period will never show up in one of my blog posts. Meanwhile, I’ll never blame Tom Robbins, my then-favorite author, for my smoking, but his book certainly helped me pick the brand:

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Look familiar? The book is hilarious, very worth a read. It’s one of my lifelong favorites.

Anyway, the point is, I came out of that transition to adulthood with a cigarette in my hand. Starting smoking was easy. I never believed (who does?) that I would smoke for a long time. It was something to share with Mom and aunties, that mutual compassion among smokers. It’s hard to say something good ever came out of smoking – but given that we smokers live with them in all our waking hours, there are bound to be some positives that get caught up, like innocent dolphins in fishing nets.

Sitting in a Denny’s booth reading a book, sipping a bottomless cup of coffee and smoking. Lighting up outside the movie theater after a foreign film. Escaping the awkwardness of a party, outside with a cigarette. Getting Dunhills at the tobacco shop so I could dress up as Hunter S. Thompson for Halloween. Being a night owl, outside on a fire escape at 2:30 a.m., hearing train sounds, cigarette in hand. These things felt, maybe even still feel, cool. Well, except the Hunter Thompson thing. That dude lost his glow, but Tom Robbins still hasn’t.

Kissing a smoker may be like licking an ashtray, sure. But kissing someone who’s self-righteous and intolerant is like licking a mongoose’s ass. (Tom Robbins – Still Life with Woodpecker)

Much more (in)famous

Of course, cigarettes are better-known for bad things – health outcomes, bad smell, stained fingertips or teeth, huge cost, social pariah-hood. They’re associated with tough moments in life, as well: they accompany a smoker through setbacks, long waits, family stresses, bureaucracies, break-ups, bar fights. Boring jobs, demanding jobs, demeaning jobs. They serve as a pacifier of sorts, or at least they did for me. I could cork my mouth with a cigarette when my words might have gotten me in trouble, or anytime I feared expressing myself. I could burn with rage through the orange ember at the end. They left curls of smoke in the air, butts in ashtrays, empty packets like a trail of my whereabouts.

And what whereabouts! When I began to travel for work, cigarettes were my constant companion. My portable, combustible buddies to worlds far and wide – five continents, if you’re still convinced that Europe and Russia are on different ones. If you’ve ever found yourself on a dirt road in rural Liberia with no way to tell anyone you’ve got a flat, or if you’re accidentally locked in an outhouse in Guatemala, you’ll know what kind of anxiety can weave amongst the grasses, the terrible roads, the bank guards carrying machine guns, the run-down neighborhoods, the crappy hotels – all the events and things that surprise, delight or scare a well-meaning and very curious but very privileged white woman traveler. There was one quick answer to every delay, wrong turn, scary sight, discomfort, or otherwise cockeyed, sideways, pear-shaped moment of travel: a cigarette!

A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want? (Oscar Wilde)

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A new chapter

Despite the long, unrelenting relationship I’ve had with cigarettes, a month ago, I put them aside.

I’d been thinking and talking about quitting so long. Worrying about smoking was probably nearly as bad for me as actually smoking. When I finally set a date, and told all my nearest and dearest so I’d be embarrassed if I didn’t quit, I was serious. It’s a cliché to say you have to be ready, but I must have been. It helped to think of it as a wedding gift to Ramon, and to me.

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All the stuff on my pre-quit-date list has come true: I no longer stink, and I’m no longer polluting the world. I don’t have to buy them, try to ignore the gruesome pictures on the label, find a lighter, find a place to smoke, hide from peers or family or strangers who I might inadvertently bother. Never again have to find a place for the butts. Nor visit the tobacco store in what felt like a forever loop. I’m no longer coping with difficult emotions by using something that hurts me. Since “smoking” and “fretting” were so closely linked for me, and for so long, there have been times this month when it actually felt like a relief not to smoke anymore.

I already feel “healthy” – as if just quitting alone takes me right down that infographic, to the point where your body almost doesn’t even remember having smoked. I don’t smell bad (well, at least not like cigarettes. The recipe I made last night had 12 cloves of garlic and half a cup of gochujang). I am not coughing, and I breathe deeper – it feels almost like hyperventilating – without ever having realized I was breathing shallowly before. I know it’s not all resolved inside me… It is damaging to smoke for as long as I did. But I’m capitalizing on feeling this good, this much of a fresh start. Even thinking that has to be such a positive for mind, spirit and body.

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Cravings are no joke

The first few weeks were kind of shaky, but a lot of it was just me being dramatic. (David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames)

There are a hundred moments in the day when I might once have smoked, and now I have to fit something else into that hole. Changing habits is helpful but not always possible. If I tend to want a cigarette after eating, well, I can’t exactly stop eating, can I? I keep feeling like I’m forgetting something, it’s just over my shoulder… like there’s something I’m supposed to be doing.

There’s so much like that with cigarettes – completely contradictory, backward, at cross-purposes… and I think that’s part of why the addiction has been so wildly successful over these couple-hundred years of hooking people, this godzillion-dollar industry. Because it creates its own anxiety – it’s a perpetual motion machine all its own. Like so many addictions, you need it to feel normal. Your own dopamine production needs its little nicotine buddy or it can’t get out of bed. Love-hate is so compelling.

This could explain why for the first couple of weeks, I felt quite flat, not “depressed” but not myself either. Now, I feel more elated when I think this is finally it – I’m done with them. When I can really see into a long life ahead without them. And without all the fretting.

Last pic

I’m middle-aged, and, for the first time in thirty years, I feel invincible. (David Sedaris)

I feel hopeful, stupidly optimistic, and that’s exactly how I like to feel.

I’d heard that when you try to break an addiction, you do have to travel back to the point in time when you first started. I was about 19, hopeful and stupidly optimistic, maybe I’d even call it “painfully idealistic” in hindsight. But I didn’t know much about my inner world, what guided me. I had a lot to learn and I can see some of the pathway I’ve traipsed since then.

This is me, on my way to what comes next.

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