How Cigarettes Stole My Soul And How I Got It Back

Smoke Out

It’s not about getting cancer or having smelly breath and hair. It’s not about those gory pictures of necks with holes in them or molten toes blackened with gangrene. It’s not even the silly price. The main reason I don’t want to smoke is that cigarettes steal my soul.

Take a recent sizzling day in Oxfordshire. Three of my old school friends and their families are gathered in our friend Leah’s garden. The adults are on an assortment of chairs on the untamed grass and the kids, all under four, all shouting, and all in fairy wings, are running up and down a moss-stained slide. Due to the threat of rain, the picnic is inside Leah’s cottage, I am rolling a cigarette as I go in for another ginger beer. As I do, my friend Natalie pops her head up from behind the fridge. Natalie, I’ve known since I was four. To this day, the number five keypad on her Mum’s landline is crunchy from the time I threw up over it as a teenager after a night of Merlot and Baileys. Natalie has two kids. I haven’t seen her in months. However, right now all I’m thinking is, ‘Shit! I wish she wasn’t here!’

‘How’s it going with Mark? she asks, her cheeky, blue eyes glinting. Usually, I’d leap at any opportunity to talk about my delicious boyfriend and often create opportunities when they don’t naturally arise. However, right now I couldn’t care less about sharing how well we navigate conflict through high levels of self-inquiry or how sporty the sex is. All I want to do is to get back outside and smoke my cigarette! ‘Yeah, yeah. Good, good, good’, I say, reaching past her for a can and refusing eye contact.

The problem with cigarettes is they hijack my attention and hamper my ability to be present with who or what is in front of me. I’ve smoked on and off since I was sixteen, so for twenty-five years. Not only am I more present and available when I don’t smoke, because of this, I enjoy life more. When I smoke, I don’t throw myself into social situations in quite the same way, because I don’t have to. With cigarettes, I have something that at the tinge of boredom or discomfort I can escape with. This may sound good, but it’s not. It brings nothing new. There can be gifts on the other side of uncomfortable feelings.

My latest tryst with smoking started a year ago, a few months into my relationship with Mark, who was never without a pouch of Americal Spirit tobacco. We meet in Winter at a regular ecstatic dance held in a tranquil neighbourhood church in North London. Ironically, I only started going to the dance because, the summer before, I’d quit smoking. In fact, not only had I quit smoking, I’d quit drinking too. To comfort and inspire me during that time, I gobbled up a ton of ‘quit lit’ — books on quitting drinking and smoking — as well as podcasts and YouTube videos. One video that spoke to me was the author Jonathan Hari’s, TED talk, ‘Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong’. At the end, with the hairs on my arms prickling, he said, ‘the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, the opposite of addiction is connection.’

In past attempts at quitting drinking and smoking, I would stay at home, avoiding all social situations and hold my breath until, I hoped, the desire to pick up had passed. Obviously, this hadn’t worked and living alone and working from home, I knew that if this was to last, I needed more for myself. Instead of hibernating, I resisted resistance and pushed myself out the door. I rambled over moors and down coastal paths on group hikes and tried things I’d been curious about like ecstatic dance, contact improv, sound healing, fetish nights and pole dancing. Pole dancing didn’t stick — too much pole burn and nowhere near enough core strength, but ecstatic dance was revelatory, plus the sweaty, handsome man I kept spotting there didn’t hurt.

For the first four months of dating Mark, I didn’t smoke. Then one night I pressed the ‘fuck it’ button and joined him for a rollie. The odd cigarette at the end of the night quickly doubled into one with a coffee in the morning. After that boundary was trampled, I’d get him to roll me cigarettes for the days I didn’t see him.

When he went to Portugal to visit his daughter, I resisted buying tobacco, however, the day he returned, I was keenly aware that I was as equally excited for a cigarette as I was for my lover. As I sat straddling Mark’s lap on the sofa, I felt impatient and edgy. ‘I’m telling you’, he said, slapping the back of his right hand into his left for emphasis, ‘some of the men there were seventy plus, but looked like Gods!’ He was fizzing about a callisthenics park he’d stumbled on at the beach, and although I made sure my face reported interest, I was mostly thinking about the tobacco in his coat pocket. I lasted ten minutes before cutting him off.

It would be easy for me to think, ‘Hey, big deal, you hadn’t smoked for a week, you wanted a fag’, but it’s not just that fag. As soon as I stubbed that one out, my brain started obsessing about when to have a second. I knew I had to have one before we went for an Indian, and you can’t have a palak paneer and a garlic nan without a cigarette to digest it! Within moments it would seem, I have a smoking schedule that we both need to adhere to.

I love this man and I’m invested in our relationship. Regardless of his relationship with smoking, he met me as a thriving non-smoker not a distracted, fatigued, nicotine addict.

In the Summer, after another month of mooching off of Mark, I go to a festival at Mount Pilatus in Switzerland. He can’t join me and I spend a day in Zurich before, walking around the clean, airy city, scoffing hazelnut gelato and agonising over whether to buy tobacco. Of course, I do, and on the drive up to the mountains, I petition myself to keep it to four or five fags a day. This does not happen!

The first morning, after a cigarette and a coffee, I go to the area where an ecstatic dance is meant to be starting. It’s stunning, being at the far end of the festival site, closest to the face of Mount Pilatus a vast, muscular mountain, like the one on a bar of Toblerone. Apart from a shirtless man in baggy purple pants arched in a cat-cow stretch, the only other person there is the DJ, sending out clipped bursts of trans-dimensional didgeridoo as she performs sound checks. ‘Have a quick ciggy before it starts,’ I urge myself. ‘No, you’ve just had one’, I quarrel back.

After a few more minutes, I roll one up and feed the hungry wolf. I don’t enjoy it as my mouth is dry and I get no rush, but I’m compelled. If I hadn’t been smoking, I probably would have wandered barefoot through the soft, dewy grass toward the mountain, staying in earshot, or connected with a friendly stranger warming up. I have had countless similar moments.

As the week progresses I feel increasingly possessed. I want to be alone a lot, especially when smoking. It feels like a waste of a cigarette if I have to talk to someone and smoke. I search for hidden spots, places I won’t be interrupted and find a wooden picnic bench, on the outskirts of the grounds by a stream, that I return to over and over.

I also feel impatient and want to hurry through activities. This is a private festival. Everyone here is contributing to making the festival what it is. My friends, Dani and Lars, have brought homemade scones, cucumber sandwiches and miniature glass bottles of red and blue ‘potion’ for a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. ‘Sounds brilliant’, I’d said when I’d offered to help. However, pulling the china out of their camper van and unwrapping each saucer from its sheet of newspaper feels silly and tedious as does stapling playing cards to red ribbon to make bunting.

When the guests float into jazz curling out of Dani’s gramophone and fussing over which colour potion to pick I take no enjoyment in their delight. In fact, I just wish they’d hurry up so we can all eat our scones, upholstered with cream and jam, and I can get back to my picnic table. We’re outside, I could light up anytime in the warm mountain air, but clearly, a cigarette is not just a cigarette anymore. It’s become the centrepiece of a solitary ritual so compelling for the sense of relief and stimulation I’ve fused to it, that I’ve unfastened from trying to find it anywhere else.

An hour later, sucking down smoke and watching a chain of ants scurry along a crumb-filled crack in the table, I’m appalled at how antisocial I’m being, but this behaviour is the truest expression of my relationship with cigarettes. They were always here to keep me company whilst I kept myself separate, unavailable and distracted.

In a month, I will go to The States to visit my brother and spend time with my four-year-old nephew. I will sleep on a blowup mattress in my brother’s study. When I’m woken in the morning by an excited little boy wanting to play monster trucks, I don’t want my first thought to be, ‘When can I get away from him to smoke a cigarette?’

At my sacred picnic bench, on the last evening, I agree to leave the festival a non-smoker. I’ll have my last tomorrow.

Waking up with a sore tongue I get a watery coffee from the breakfast tent, slip into my bikini and wrapping a towel around my waist, head to my picnic table. Annoyingly it’s occupied by a Swiss family loading up hunks of bread with meats and cheeses. ‘Fuck’s sake’, I spit under my breath. Instead, I find a spot on the stone wall overlooking the stream.

I look down at my ‘last cigarette’ and after a moment’s acknowledgement, light up, taking slow, deliberate puffs. I stare down hypnotised by the current in the sun-dappled stream and smoke my fag right down to the filter, burning my fingertips. Then wrapping the butt in a tissue and shoving it into my handbag I prepare for what I’m about to do next. When my friend Dani smoked her last cigarette one New Year’s Eve she did a ceremonial ‘dance of freedom’. I’ve decided to baptise myself!

There’s a spot downstream about four feet deep at the head of a damn. The water is clear, still and ice cold, shaded by a bow of dark green leaves. I hold my breath and slip down into the water in one cool move. The freezing water floods my nostrils and pools in my warm armpits. The water feels cleansing and purifying and I come up and drop down three times. Somehow it feels a holy, sacred number.

Walking back to the campsite I feel invigorated. I’m officially a non-smoker! The sun is blazing and I lie down in a field to dry. Spreading my arms and legs out wide in open surrender, I pray for the strength to stay quit. The message comes to see any cravings over the next few days as a release. I smile at this. It feels good. In this way cravings are welcomed as a chance to refrain from putting any more nicotine into my system, allowing its grip to loosen, eventually, completely.

On the drive back to the airport, however, sorrow and relief play a game of tennis in my head as I think about what I’ve committed to and what I have to let go of.

As much as I’m miserable being in its grip, smoking is a companion and one that distracts me from painful, uncomfortable feelings. Along with food and booze — when I used to drink — it’s part of a roster of substances and behaviours that in rotation, shield me from ever having to be alone with myself, unassisted. Of course, I can’t smoke, eat or drink glasses of Malbec, all day long, but the escape isn’t just found in the consuming, it’s in the anticipation of it too — knowing something is there waiting, punctuating the day with, ‘something to look forward too’.

Smoking has also been a container for my anxiety at work and in my relationship. For instance when I’ve convinced myself I’ve blown it with Mark and he’s going to end things simply because I said something ‘stupid’ in a voice message. In those moments, when I can’t concentrate on anything, but doing nothing feels worse, I can at least pad up and down the walkway outside my building sucking on a fag until he replies.

Equally when I am feeling lost in life, unmotivated, but desperate for a new direction and a fix for the emptiness within, wondering whether to start trying for a baby in my forties or embarking on a new vocation, cigarettes are a buffer somehow to making any decision. Being in the grip of something I feel powerless over that drains my energy and attention, nothing serious can really happen apart from rolling up and pretending I’ll work it all out tomorrow.

It was in my therapist’s office in leafy Hampstead, lying on her couch and looking up, as I always do, at the crack in her ceiling that she suggested that instead of smoking simply being something that comforts me through my stagnation, perhaps, unconsciously I keep lapsing back into smoking as a way of actually keeping myself stuck, small and in suffering. It was a stretch for my mind, and at first, I dismissed the idea, but the evidence stacks up.

Within a week of getting home from the festival, after a few crunchy days of cravings and sudden outbursts of tears as I adjusted back to life without cigarettes, I felt back to my former thriving self. My dullened skin had its natural glow back and my eyes sparkled again. On the yoga mat, I was pushing myself again instead of feeling excluded as I watched others lever into headstands and effortlessly rock forward into crow pose. I felt more connected and present with Mark, who also quit. On lie-in days, we could wake up slowly together, instead of me jumping out to quickly smoke a cigarette because I couldn’t wait for him to come round with a coffee first. I was focusing better in my editing work, back to tackling difficult scenes head-on rather than absconding to the grubby stairwell in my building every hour or two, wasting valuable time I’d only have to make up for later in the evening. I even launched back into writing, starting this piece after months of feeling ‘creatively blocked’.

However after a couple of months smoke-free, one evening, out of sorts, and panicking at a night in with no plans, I suggested to Mark, ‘as a treat for being so good’ that we buy some tobacco, smoke it, and throw the rest of it away the next day. We did, but nothing went in the bin and a month later we were both back to giving up.

I already know from past attempts that I can’t just have a few cigarettes and expect not to be pulled back in, so why if I was feeling better did I light up and effectively agree to be a smoker again and to all the shit that comes with it?

I haven’t mined the darkest recess of my psyche to give a full answer, but if I’m to stay quit, I have to take smoking as the matter of life or death that it is. By that I don’t mean physical death, I know I’m harming my health, but soul death, the destruction of the self.

As humans we are wired for growth, Alexander Lowen, the father of Bioenergetics, a body-based therapy, described his definition of happiness as, ‘the consciousness of growth’. When I smoke I regress into an outdated coping behaviour that arrests my evolution. Every cigarette smoked is a missed opportunity to stay with whatever experience I’m having without running or getting help. I think at the heart of why I feel so disturbed when I smoke is the fear of self-abandonment, that I will leave myself to rot and allow my hopes and dreams which hang on the freedom to focus and the vitality of being a non-smoker to fall to ash. That is the terror.

Understanding smoking as an expression of a desire to self-destruct gives my attempts to quit, a powerful dimension. Knowing how it affects me, I have a choice. I can either spend more of my precious time in and out of the quicksand of addiction, or I can leave it behind for good and continue to expand into a life so rich that relying on appointments with a toxic, harmful substance for stimulation and comfort becomes irrelevant.

It’s been one month and counting since my last cigarette, and I’m determined to keep it that way.