Irrational Fear

I picked up my smoking habit just over a year ago. I got into some trouble with the law and one of the ways I dealt with it was smoking. For a couple weeks thereafter, I was smoking a pack a day. I was incredibly stressed and didn’t have anything else to do but reflect on my actions, cigarette in hand. After the initial shock wore down, I realized I was on a fast track to being dead broke and forming unpleasant tumors throughout my respiratory system. I didn’t quit, but I slowed down some.

I was strongly encouraged to move back in with my family for the following semester. I no longer had their trust in my ability to live independently. But, I was alright with the situation; I needed to collect the pieces of my life that had been lost in the explosion that was my arrest. While living with my family, my smoking habits changed. Rather than being able to smoke whenever I wanted, I was confined to smoking in my car on the way to school/work and sneaking out at night to smoke on the porch. It was somewhat inconvenient, but I knew my family (Mother especially) didn’t like me smoking. So, like an unfaithful husband, I tried to hide it as much as possible, and, like an unfaithful husband, I was caught every now and then.

This past semester I found myself living away from my parents again. I smoked whenever I wanted. Sweet Freedom! I began to smoke more but it wasn’t an extraordinary increase. It probably averaged out to about a pack every four days or so. However, it was during this past semester that many of my friends began to quit smoking, or at least they tried to. I thought about quitting, but then soon decided that I didn’t really want to. I couldn’t find anything wrong with it. To this day I don’t. Sure, there’s the threat of lung cancer and all that shit, but you’re gonna die eventually. Why spend it worrying about some disease that may or may not make it self present? And, to be honest, I thought smoking was kind of cool. Aside from most of my friends smoking, Mad Men played a sizable role in developing that attitude; also, Goodfellas, Ryan Gosling in the Place Beyond the Pines, Chance the Rapper, Quinten Tarantino’s films, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, pretty much any rock band, Mark Twain, Sawyer from Lost, Hunter S. Thompson, The Blues Brothers, Samuel Beckett, and Kurt Vonnegut all contributed. Practically all of the things I like were either created by or feature someone that smokes. I knew I didn’t want to smoke for the rest of my life and that it was pretty expensive, but there was never a feature of smoking that actually made me want to stop.

Then, a romantic interest was introduced into my life. She didn’t like my smoking, but I was helplessly addicted. All she could do was pity me. I really wanted to stop smoking for her; it made my kisses unpleasant, and no one likes being around the smell of smoke all the time. I tried to not smoke in her presence or when I knew I would see her later. Most times I would cave and she would have to deal with it, or, trembling, I would reach for my pack and lighter as soon as she stepped out of my car, desperate to experience that incomprehensible bliss of the first cigarette in a “long” time, and watch her shake her head as she walked through her doorway.

One day at work, having just gotten back from a vacation to Mexico, I told my fellow smoking buddies about some of the scare campaigns they run down there. There are pictures of dead babies and people with the most disgusting mouths you’ll ever see on the front of cigarette packs. Someone brought up the picture of the limp ‘cigarette’. We all had a good laugh. Then it hit me; Impotency. This was my way out!. This is something that could seriously make my life miserable. This is a valid candidate for a reason to stop smoking. I had previous knowledge of this terrifying side effect of smoking, but I had always dismissed it because I had never really wanted to quit before (and, sadly, it hadn’t been a relative issue in my life). Also, I’m only 20 years old; realistically, it would take years of smoking, at a much faster rate, for impotency to become a tangible consequence. So. I had to speed up the process; I had to develop this fear prematurely.

I did some research online, ignoring all of the facts about high blood pressure, which can be caused by a multitude of things, one being smoking, and instead made smoking the primary and direct source of impotency. I recalled reading Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. I imagined myself as the tortured protagonist, desperately in love, but hopelessly unable to express his love physically. I came up with absurd scenarios in which I would disappoint the woman of my dreams over and over again. I constantly meditated on these subjects for three days until I thought I was scared enough to stop smoking.

Now, I knew this fear was superficial and that it wouldn’t hold up for too long, so I had to begin my test of will as soon as possible. None of this “I’ll just finish the pack” bullshit. I was on a time crunch. So, I quit halfway through a pack of American Spirit originals, my favorites. I set up the turquoise blue pack on my dresser with the shadowed Indian facing me, taunting me. Whenever I looked at it, I imagined a woman’s face, disappointed and unsatisfied, as if Santa hadn’t brought her what she wanted on Christmas morning. It was, in a word, motivating.

The first day was pretty easy. I wasn’t in a bad mood. The headache wasn’t unbearable. It was as if my body were a little annoyed, but it was containing its agitation for the time being. At work, between breaks, I would go to the usual smoking area with my coworkers. I was desperate for a drag, and almost asked a few times, but I imagined that same woman’s face and the shame I might feel were that situation, in which she displays her wanting expression, ever to actualize. It looked like my tactic was working; the imagined repercussions of smoking were far more compelling than the desire for a cigarette.

The second day was hell. I had a monstrous headache. I felt like my ears were ringing. I couldn’t focus on anything except how badly I wanted to smoke. The slightest perturbation led to utterly nonsensical rage. I got into a huge fight with my roommate over whether gun silencers worked or not. I disliked everyone and everything that day. Nothing was exempt from my wrath. All I wanted to do was watch, sadistically, as the mystical fire bird on that American Spirit cigarette turned to ash once again. I wanted to embody Zephyrus, god of the western wind, and blow a massive lung-full of smoke into the atmosphere. I didn’t care if I could ever fuck again. I wanted a goddamn cigarette.

But, miraculously, I persevered. I made it to the third day, which was a little worse than the first. I was already used the the empty feeling in the pit of my soul from the absence of cigarettes in my life. The headache didn’t bother me as much. The desire to smoke was still there, but I had been through the worst of it. The fear of impotency was barely clinging on, I didn’t really think about it much. When I got home from work I simply laid in bed and tried to sleep.

When I woke up the next morning I felt great. I didn’t even think about smoking until I was halfway through my morning commute. It had worked. I had kicked my habit. Also, gone was my irrational fear of impotency. I regained my common sense and knew, once again, that I had nothing to worry about. There was still a minuscule desire to smoke every now and then, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t beat down with my regular willpower.

It’s been almost a month now since I quit. I’ve tried to smoke one time since then. I’m not sure what prompted it, but I saw no reason not to smoke due to the fact that I still had that half pack of American Spirits. I grabbed one from the pack, hunted down a lighter and went outside to sit on the stairs of my apartment complex. I lit the cigarette, took two drags, decided it was one of the worst tastes I’ve ever experienced and put it out. Even though my tactic to quit smoking had only worked on the surface level, it got me over the hump, enabling me to sustain from smoking long enough for my body to erase the desire to smoke from my system. I’m not sure what the psychological effects of my strategy will be (willingly created fake phobias can’t be healthy for the mind), but at least my lungs are doing alright now.