I have asthma, and there is a major respiratory disease going around, and I am a smoker. I have an inhaler, face mask, and Marlboro Gold in my coat pockets. When everyone else thought smoking was cool, I took it up in my 30s as others might develop an interest in birdwatching, or a sport. For the best part of a decade, four or five days a week. My mother can't know that this piece is anonymous. I don't know how to express how stupid I feel about this.
There is a lot going on here, but not all of it is important to me or my therapist. You might think that a continuing international emergency that is more dangerous for smokers would mean fewer idiots like me. Research published in August last year suggested that the number of young adults smoking in England went up by about a quarter during the first lockdown, as a result of stress and boredom. There was a spike in the number of people giving up smoking in England during the first few months of the ban, but there was no sign of the decline you might expect. This habit has never been rational.
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I don't know what kind of smoker I am, but I know I'm not casual or social: I'm highly committed to something very unpopular. The packet in my pocket is not something I want to try. It is more for a desire of wanting. My heart is not in it, but my heart would probably have strong opinions in the opposite direction. Only sentient organs get a vote. It feels as if my problem is that I still think this habit that makes me smell awful and look desperate is cool. My therapist asks if you felt cool when you were a teenager, and it is obvious to us both that the question is a rhetorical one.
I started smoking after a break up.
It makes sense, but it is also a crutch and a way to ignore the fact that I am addicted. I have barely been to any parties for a long time and, apart from the neighbour's cat, there is no audience when I get ash on myself.
I started, for reasons I don't fully understand, as a sort of warped, bloody-minded reinvention after a break-up. I should have known from my inability to leave half a pack of sweets in a cupboard for the next day that it wouldn't work; I had slipped from a pack a month to one every few days.
I wish I had understood how addictive nicotine would be, how misleading the term "craving" would be, and how the truth would be more like the little fillip. I almost always give in to it because it doesn't seem like it's that intense, but I don't often leave it long enough to be faced with a more powerful compulsion than that. I think I have a weakness for treats.
I don't think I want to stop or understand how urgent it is. I don't want this monologue to stay in my head any more, because I don't want it to be boring when I'm not thinking about anything. I started Juul-ing in the year 2021, so it is possible that the additional opportunities for mental drift has helped me reach at least this caveated breakthrough. I have gone more than a week between cigarettes, at the cost of an umbilical attachment to a mysterious little obelisk, because previous attempts failed spectacularly. If the battery light blinks red, I feel nervous because I buy bulk of menthol. The gaps are getting a bit longer and easier to tolerate, but I always come back to smoking in the end.
This isn't consoling. I feel good about smoking less, but I'm stuck on using the Vaping as a harm-reduction method, not a step towards kicking the habit. I tell myself that once I am waving my hands at the universe, I will get on with it.
I miss being the person I was before I smoked because I didn't know how much of a luxury it was.
The prospect of killing myself is fixed. If I were to have a child, I would stop, but that might just be another rationalisation for putting it off. I am the sort of person who smokes behind their hand in a meeting and blows a small cloud out of the corner of his mouth as if no one will notice.
I miss being the person I used to be, when I didn't know how much of a luxury it was, and I know that even if I give up nicotine completely, the victory will be overshadowed by a sense of loss. This piece is less funny than I thought it would be. Two years into a global pandemic, that could be a good thing for personal growth, because it shows you are capable of facing the absurdity of the harm you are doing to yourself.
