I smoked my last cigarette a year ago today. On November 17th last year I went to a Wilco show at the Midland Theatre in Kansas City, and on the way I smoked the last cigarette in the last pack I had bought. I was feeling kind of congested and gross in my chest that night, so it was easy enough not to buy another pack (even though smoking at shows has been a constant trigger for 15 years now). It was a fun show with a great setlist (“Jesus, Etc.,” “Via Chicago,” and “Impossible Germany”), but mostly I remember the cigarette I smoked in the car before it.
For whatever reason, I decided not to buy another pack the next day. Or the day after that. Or the next day. The forehead tension and nicotine-withdrawal headaches had started by then, but lord knows I had been through “quitting” enough times to know they were coming and brace myself for the DTs. I’ve quit smoking a lot since 2005, but never for quite this long. A year is a first for me.
I’m the idiot who didn’t start smoking until I was old enough to know better. I didn’t smoke in high school or college. Never tried a cigarette. My biggest chemical vice in college was coffee. I didn’t start smoking until I was in grad school—when academic pressures and personal stresses collided and I picked up a pack of Parliament Lights and inhaled and felt an unpleasant cloud in my lungs but a pleasant clarity in my head.
I loved smoking. Honestly, I’m pretty sure I still do. I love the impact of nicotine as it hits your brain for the first time in the day. I love how it brings comfort and focus. I love how it settles things—how even when life seem to be stressful and out of control, there’s a release and a relaxation you can find when you tilt your head slightly to the side and cup your left hand over the lighter and light the cigarette tip and breathe in deeply.
I love the routine of it—the first smoke of the day, the first smoke after work, the smoke outside after the kids go to bed. (I was mostly a closet smoker. The kids never saw a cigarette in my hand or knew I smoked. That’s kind of a minor miracle, since I’ve smoked off and on for their entire lives.) I love the smoke that accompanies full moons and thunderstorms and snowfalls and travel. The last smoke of the night, before I put away the day—however great or horrible the day has been.
The dumb, self-destructive part of me started smoking at 30, but the residual honors kid in me always knew how stupid it was. I didn’t think about it every day, but I thought about it often enough to squelch some of the oblivious enjoyment. I’d quit for a couple weeks, or a month, or a couple months at a time. I think I quit for about six months a few years ago. But I’d always go back. Because…again, I enjoyed it. It settled and balanced me. And there was always a trigger—some stressful thing or a carefree night out—that would lead me to buy just one more pack (and then another).
As much as I like smoking, I know it will eventually kill me. And maybe that realization caught up with me a year ago. I was intentionally filling my lungs with sludge and hiding that from my kids and some of my friends and colleagues. I was coughing a lot, unnecessarily. I was paranoid about cigarette butts that weren’t completely put out starting a fire outside the house. I hated the part of myself that couldn’t just stop.
It was costly in a lot of ways. I did the calculation today, and I would have spent $1,092 on the cigarettes I haven’t smoked in the last 365 days. In the grand scheme of things, I guess that’s not a lot. But when you’re unemployed in the middle of a global health crisis that’s ravaging people with lung problems, smoking seems even more stupid than it might be otherwise.
Ultimately, though, I guess I just decided that I have enough bad habits in my life without keeping this one around. I don’t have the willpower to only smoke a pack a year during social situations. And I don’t have the discipline to wean myself off smoking by using a pill or nicotine gum or any of the other things I’ve tried over the years. So it came down to a random decision to quit cold turkey on a mid-November night, and then the stubborn determination to keep on going. One more bad habit to leave behind.
Since that night, I’ve made it through the holidays with family, New Year’s Eve, a couple more concerts, a job layoff, a pandemic, a lockdown/quarantine, late-night driveway drinks with friends, an interview for a new job, the stresses of an actual new job, and an incredibly tense election season without picking up a pack or bumming a single smoke.
I don’t know if all of that made it easier or harder. Maybe the haze of an impossibly bizarre year made it easier to cloud out the temptation—to not want to pick it up again. If nothing else was normal, maybe that could be abnormal, too. Maybe I could make it through every day without a nicotine kick because that would be the normal thing—the expected thing. But it’s 2020, so…well, you know—fuck that. Why should the easier thing be the thing that was slowly killing me?
I said “my last cigarette” earlier like there’s some sort of permanent finality to it. That’s incredibly optimistic, but it’s also kind of bullshit. I know full well there’s always a chance I could start smoking again. Maybe we have a vaccine next year, and concert season starts back up again, and I have a couple whiskey/cokes at Crossroads KC and a band I love plays a song that helped me get through this awful year and I decide to light up again and have just one smoke.
Honestly, the thought of that makes me a little wistful. I want that badly, and that’s how I know I’m not completely out of this. I might never be. When I tell people that I haven’t smoked in a while, there’s always someone who says “Oh, just wait—you’ll hate the smell of cigarette smoke now that it’s out of your system.” But that’s not true for me. I still very much enjoy the smell of cigarette smoke. I can still tell when someone is smoking a Parliament, and I would love to join them…to inhale and feel the smoke hit the back of my throat and feel the familiar, comfortable recessed filter on the tip of my tongue and feel the rush in my head and in my chest.
But it’s been a year now since I’ve indulged that feeling, and I really do think that’s mostly behind me. It’s mostly a distant romanticization at this point. As much as I love(d) smoking, I don’t think there’s anything that could prompt me to go back. Nothing that makes any sense, anyway. Maybe my head has finally won. If I can make it through all the shit I’ve endured this year, I can’t really think of a reason to fall back on smoking as a way to get through a crisis.
I could be wrong. I’m not going to call myself an ex-smoker, because I’m always just a trigger away. But even if that happens, I'll at least know that I’m capable of making it through a year without nicotine. That’s a real thing that happened. And it’s something to stop and feel good about. This year, we should embrace whatever successes—however arbitrary and minor—we can find. Because who knows how long they’ll last?
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