Why I smoke
Even though I know I should quit
It’s a little before one AM. About 6 hours before I need to wake up and get myself ready for work, I leave my house full of sleeping roommates, and drive to the 24 hour convenience store for another pack of cigarettes. I’ve been trying to quit smoking for the last month, and failing horribly. I didn’t realise I was addicted until recently. And it’s hard for me to know exactly how I got here.
According to my notebooks I bought my first pack of cigarettes around the time my first serious relationship ended. According to my memory I spent the weeks leading up to that, manic and rushing down to the corner store for cigars, and whatever else would feed my writing fury. Something about all this memory doesn’t ring true to me though. Sometimes it’s more important for me to know how I felt about these things.
Growing up I preferred pens to pencils, some of it was ease of writing, and some of it was my tendency to chew entirely through the wood, leaving my pencils sad and eraserless. For a year or so I kept a plastic soda bottle cap in my pocket, and throughout the day I’d take it out and squeeze it as hard as I could, digging a ring into my palm. Feeling the plastic digging into my skin, and feeling the pressure, while the tension in my hand slowly replaced the tension in my head.
I haven’t been a true smoker for the whole of this time. I’ve gone back and forth between buying packs and not. Often enough it’s the people I date who get me smoking again. That seems to be a pattern. Somewhere along the line cigarettes became something of their own though. It happened quietly and over a long period.
When I first started, beyond being in the throes of a breakup, and the wild fluctuation of still unmedicated bi-polar disorder, I was also in therapy for OCD. Still doing rituals, trying painfully to avoid doing things in sixes. In each little moment my mind begged my left shoulder to come up and touch my left ear. Or my tongue to touch the inside of my cheek six times. The lines and cracks on the pavement were like horrifying voids that led to terror and death. If I were to step on one, the world would end, and those I loved would die. I would see the bloodied broken body of my girlfriend, and know that what I was seeing was real. Until the panic passed, and the ridiculousness became apparent.
Maybe that is what drove me into becoming a smoker. Something about the oral fixation, and the ritual, something about the nicotine, all of it. Something about cigarettes soothed me. I didn’t get the idea on my own. Somewhere in the few weeks I’d spent sleeping in my car because I was too anxious to ask my friends in town for a place to sleep, I read a few books of David Sedaris essays. He talked about Cigarettes helping his OCD. he wasn’t wrong.
Now, past those days of terror and confusion, medicated, and ritual free, I wonder why I still smoke. There’s the voice in my head that yells out for desire of nicotine when I’ve left cigarettes alone too long. There’s the little running ticker of anxiety that reasserted itself when I tried to quit, and quietly insinuates itself into everything. There’s the simple feeling of smoking the first cigarette of the day. that feeling of being awake, but in a cloud. Being a wavering quantum being in an analogue world. Something ephemeral brewing inside of your head while the concrete tries to come in and touch you.
A lot of it is change. In the years since, I’ve gotten my OCD under control. In the years since, I’ve found a working medication regimen. My life has changed vastly. Cigarettes have been a constant through some important stretches. I don’t entirely know how to be alone with myself anymore. Cigarettes give me a way to mediate that. As an introvert, not being good with alone time is a very odd feeling. It feels awkward to find that I’ve determined my abilities with myself by some chemical sensation. But then again, I couldn’t deal with any of the roiling powers inside me were it not for another chemical.
In a brief break between jobs, I found myself trying to quit cigarettes, but not knowing what the hell to do with myself. I had thought my anxious overthinking was gone. The harried, worried edge to those thoughts didn’t show itself in the past few years. I still thought everything through with this painful concern, but it didn’t cause distress. When I first quit smoking, I felt that again. Felt that worry that eats and eats until it’s consumed you. The constantly running stream of anxiety was almost worse than the big flashes of panic I used to feel. My memory of the terror isn’t good though. I’ve been free of the big bads for so long, when little anxiety flares up, it’s out of my wheelhouse. I learned to accept and get through the anxiety of the big things. Imagining the burning wreck and bloodied bodies that will spread themselves across the road when I slam my car into the centre divider does not bother me. I think about it, and accept it, and move on.
The tiny voice saying, everything you think is wrong, you’re not as well as you think you are, you aren’t loveable or attractive, you aren’t as smart as you think you are. That tiny voice is deafening. It can be ignored in small measure, but there will always be a moment that it comes back up.
So tonight, while I felt the absence of nicotine in my blood, and dreaded the coming chattering of that damn voice, I went out and bought another pack of cigarettes. Despite the cold I caught, the phlegm building up in my lungs, and the snot clogging up my nose, I bought another pack of cigarettes.
It’s a trick only smokers know, but when you have a bad cough, smoking a cigarette will hold that cough down for a while. It will come up in small increments rather than in one big fit. Training your body to selectively expel mucous has its advantages, but that speaks to the depth of ones addiction. Not only is a cigarette the best part of my morning, my lungs fighting for air through some ridiculous infection only inspires me to draw more smoke into them. Throwing gasoline on the fire. Sometimes I wonder if it’s the same with anxiety.
I can’t deny the deeply satisfying oral fixation smoking fulfills. Sometimes I care about that more than the nicotine. It’s the nicotine that my body asks for, but it’s the oral fixation that my mind asks for. Just as the making of my tea is a ritual, the smoking of a cigarette is a ritual. That ever so satisfying feeling of having ones mouth around a cigarette, and the process of putting my coat on, and walking out into the cold, buffering myself against it, drawing a clean white and yellow cigarette out of its pack, and hearing the striking sound of flint on steel. All of that fills something deep within me.
If I had religion, or some other ritualistic practise, to replace those obsessive rituals I seem to be trying to emulate, maybe I’d smoke cigarettes less, but somehow I doubt it. If only because I think my smoking has become something different over time. Where once it was a desire to put physical cost to emotional pain, as melodramatic as that is, it has now become a constant friend, and friend making device, in a very changeable world. That fear of change is something I’ve been able to assuage and overcome with time. I live in a new city, with a new job, and a new plan for my path in life. clearly my worries about change no longer rule my life. But I have to hew to some constants.
When compulsions and obsessions filled my days, the fear that haunted me was loss. Loss of those I loved. Loss of my ability to create things. Having seen the relationship that brought me to this coast dissolve, maybe I’m grabbing onto something constant to give myself a mooring. When it comes down to it, the thing that bothers me most, is that I don’t quite know why I smoke cigarettes. I know I’m addicted. I don’t want that to be the only reason, because I don’t feel like it’s ever that simple. The physical urge is something that drives me back to smoking while I try to quit, but that’s not the reason I smoke. I smoke for something different.
Does the smoke fill holes in me I still haven’t repaired. Am I self medicating, or latching on to consistency. I don’t really know. I know that each breath of smoke has the ability to bring me into the present. Not five minutes from now, where I’m concerned about what will happen, not five years ago where I was ill but oh so productive. It brings me into the now. I can meditate and get something similar, but the fixation, and the fulfillment, that’s all cigarettes. Remembering the porches and balconies and living rooms I’ve smoked on and in. Remembering the women I’ve smoked with. The small patio behind our house in Olympia, surrounded by bushes, or the balcony of the apartment complex in Davis where the can full of cigarette butts caught on fire, sending smoke up into the air. Remembering the smoke going up through the pipes in the ceiling of my first apartment in Boston. it’s hard to let go of all that.
It’s hard to remember that every day, I’m a different person than I was yesterday, even if only by the smallest increment. It’s hard to remember that in my adult life, I’ve become a mental health success story. It’s hard to remember that I’m making a new future that I’ve been putting off for so long. All of that can be swept away by smoke drawn into my lungs, by the feeling on my lips, and my fingers, by the moments I spend standing looking over my corner of Brighton, leaning against the railing of the balcony.
Letting go is something I practised long and hard. Accepting. I accepted the fear and terror of horrible loss. Accepted visions of death and destruction. I accepted the idea that I will be medicated for the rest of my life. All of these things have been good. Even while they sound dire. I have become a stable, helpful, successful person through all this work. It makes that past feel more like something I earned, and something I should get to keep. But we don’t keep our pasts. They change and morph and are constantly in flux, each new remembering changing the fundamental details. No memory ever being true to the time it was formed. That constant editing makes your memories feel like integral parts of yourself. Edited down into the stories you tell about yourself, they become something different. Something you want to keep as a mark of your success or failure. They come to define you.
As I cough, and try to avoid going outside for another cigarette, I know cigarettes can’t become that way for me. Every friend I’ve met through smoking outside of a bar, every memory I have of drawing smoke into my lungs in the good and bad times, all of those things will remain. Accepting change, and pushing oneself away from a habit that reinforces itself with addiction and nostalgia, that’s hard. I’ve let the people I date be my arbiters for change, be the things driving me towards different. and I’ve let my loves be the constant that made me feel comfortable. I’ve let the external world drive me and shape me, as often one must.
In the spirit of the other changes I’ve made in my life, new jobs, new cities, new life goals, it’s probably time to change this as well. But while that little anxious voice rushes into my head, and my body asks again that I go out for a cigarette, I have my doubts.
I grew up detesting the idea of cigarettes. They seemed disgusting. Even now I’m aware of how unpleasant they can be. Nothing in media ever made me think they were cool. I don’t even remember the process by which I tried one. Almost inevitably it was during a mania. All energy and power, thrown about within my slight frame. All of that desire to create and do and be. Speaking at a mile a minute and foisting myself on anyone who will listen, naturally an impulsive cigarette will be smoked.
It wasn’t until all of those mental health problems finally came to fore that cigarettes became a thing for me. I hadn’t smoked in high-school, and didn’t through the first year of college, despite having friends who smoked heavily, despite being knock down drunk three nights a week. Somehow I avoided them. But when I finally came to try and control my urges, and my wills, and my chemical imbalance, I latched onto something I could control completely. I think I may have started with less than a pack a week, smoking while at parties to cut the social anxiety. But then again, during the depths of depression, I don’t know what I did. It’s an act of detective work to figure any of this out.
That’s part of why this question sticks in my head, of how I became a smoker, not just how I started smoking cigarettes, but how I became someone who starts their day with a cigarette, and ends their day with one. How I became someone who is known at the convenience store by my brand. It’s this detail that bothers me, and sticks in my craw. I can put a firm finger on the things that got me kicked out of school, and threw me into mountains of debt. I can tell what led to being medicated. I can’t fully tell what led to the cigarettes. As always, it’s the things I don’t understand that bother me the most.
I’m not the cost of some social failing. Cigarettes never looked cool, and I never wanted them as an aspirational device. I never had any illusions about the fact that if I kept going, they would kill me. I never had any big push from the outside to start smoking. Every smoker I’ve ever met tells non-smokers never to start. it’s the only advice they can give. So that must mean that this little addictive fact of my personality, is all me. Having made peace with being a wild and creative person, who must hold themselves down with medication, Having made peace with the floods of anxiety that came at me in the throes of OCD, it’s a mystery why I can’t come to peace with whatever is driving this need.
The thing I wonder, is if this is just another insufficiency I have to face. Is this another way that I do not fully fit the mould? Or is it really just the regular path, that I’ve forgotten. Maybe it’s what’s left over after I’ve dealt with all the big horrible things that threw me off for those early years of adulthood. And maybe it’s just something I’m doing to give myself a constant bearing in this ever changing sea. Truthfully, I don’t know. I know I feel less anxious when I smoke, and I know I want to quit, and save my lungs and my life.
I also know it’s time to go back outside and smoke another cigarette.
