I was talking to Heather the other day about smoking. I'm an ex-smoker myself, which often surprises people who have met me in the seven years since I quit. This is the why I smoked/why I quit story:
I started smoking when I was a senior in high school. I can't remember why, what made me light the first cigarette. My best friend smoked, and we used to sit around the basement watching Humphrey Bogart movies, and I guess that had something to do with it. You can say smoking isn't cool, but there is still a dramatic quality...using the long pause to light up, dismissively blowing smoke, angrily grinding out a butt.
When I was little, almost all the adults I knew smoked. In old family pictures (I just inherited a box, that's why they've been showing up on my blog) I keep seeing someone holding the new baby in one hand and a cigarette in the other. There were ashtrays on every end table. My friends and I bought candy cigarettes from the ice cream man, and chose boxes to reflect our preferred brands.
I smoked through college. Where I worked at the time my boss and several coworkers smoked, and we discussed work in the smoking room. (Smoking had just been banned from individual offices.) I got to know smokers on other projects and in other departments. I started learning office politics because of what I picked up on smoke breaks.
After college I got married and quit smoking for awhile. My husband didn't smoke, so I didn't smoke in the house. If we went out to bars I'd usually bum a few or maybe buy a pack, but I didn't start smoking regularly until I found a job.
Interestingly, the job involved interviewing people about asbestos exposure during their work history, so I was meeting a lot of people with lung disease. Most of them smoked, or had smoked, which certainly didn't help their health.
I interviewed a client one morning. This guy had lost an arm in an industrial accident, he was on supplemental oxygen, and unless the O2 tank was on, he was chain smoking. His wife chain smoked. Their trailer was the worst-smelling place I've ever entered, and in just one hour there my hair and clothes reeked so bad the smell made me ill. I went home after that interview, threw my cigarettes away, and took a shower and washed my hair.
It didn't last. In my next job I made friends with the smokers, and started going outside with them on their breaks, going to happy hours. Next it was smoking O.P.B's...other people's brands...and then back to buying my own.
So why did I smoke? There was definitely the addictive aspect...chemical addiction to the nicotine. A cigarette did calm me down. I did like the taste. There was the social aspect...not peer pressure, but I did appreciate belonging to the club. And I admit I made some useful business contacts during the time I was smoking.
Another question...what about the adverse health effects?
The answer to that was, I didn't give a damn about dying.
During the time I smoked, I really didn't have any joy in life. I was never actively suicidal, that would have been too painful to my parents, but I was not a happy person. I was not content. The idea that I was shortening my life was not disturbing.
I hit a point where I wasn't doing much of anything healthy. I smoked, I drank too much, I alternated between not eating and eating nothing but garbage (bar food, pretty much, since I was spending most evenings in bars.) My husband and I were separating.
Then in a completely uncharacteristic move, I decided to register to do an AIDS Ride...bicycling 350 miles in four days. I didn't even own a bike. I joined a gym with a woman at work and I started riding (bought a bike, obviously). For a few months I actually used to light up cigarettes on my way out of the gym's front door after a workout. One evening I attempted to walk up the inactive escalator at the Dupont Circle metro station. About halfway up I was wheezing. At the top I was shaky. I still instinctively lit a cigarette at the top, then thought "Perhaps smoking is incompatible with endurance sports."
Going to the gym was cutting into my bar time anyway, so I was smoking less. That New Year's Eve I decided to quit, at least until after the ride.
While training, I made a lot of friends, and the weekend rides spilled over into social events. Most of the people I met had healthy lifestyles without being health Nazis, and some, I learned, had added incentive to take care of themselves because of their HIV+ status. I started feeling a little guilty that I, who didn't care if I lived or died, was healthy, while other people were having to fight to live.
It wasn't an epiphany, I didn't wake up one morning with the sudden realization that life was grand and I loved living. I also didn't set out to intentionally change, it was more that I started noticing good things in the world, and appreciating them. Crap was still going on...my grandfather died, I got laid off, I did end up divorced. But I also got to know Victor, I started a volunteer job at an HIV/AIDS service organization, and my niece was born. It was an odd transformation, cynic to optimist. It's an incomplete transformation, but complete enough that I take care of myself now. I don't enjoy every moment of every day but I want to see what's going to happen tomorrow.
Along the way I never craved another cigarette. When I'm in a smokey bar I get headaches, and I don't even like traces of the smell of smoke.
I can not think of a single good reason in the world to smoke a cigarette, and...I hope this doesn't sound insufferably smug and condescending...I feel sort of sorry for people who continue to smoke and don't even want to quit. I wonder if they are like I was, indifferent to their own health because they are, in the end, indifferent to their life.
Posted by Nic at January 10, 2004 10:35 AM | TrackBack