Not smoking

I’ve tried to quit smoking before.  Depending on your definition, I have quit smoking before several times.  Once I stopped for over a year.  But clearly, at some point I started again.  A week ago, I began the process of quitting again.  I started wearing the nicotine patch (and I’ve discovered that my right leg has magical anti-adhesive qualities but my left leg does not.  And as a little piece of advice, this is one time when I don’t recommend the generic version – it falls off even more easily than the branded patch.  I’ve also developed a new habit that makes me look crazy where I feel around on my thighs in public in moderate panic when I think the patch might have fallen off).  I hadn’t had a cigarette in six days, but last night I had two.  It was new year’s eve, which is a day so fraught with symbolism that I find it completely crazy-making.  It has the giant clean-slate-change-your-life symbolism that we all know and love, and then personally for me it is also the anniversary of the worst break up of my life and (a different year) the beginning of a long term relationship.  I’ve resolved never to let anything else important happen on new year’s eve because really, the night just can’t take up any more symbolic space in my life.

Last night, I was at a great party.  There was dancing, talking, and flirting with queer friends and community who I am so happy to have in my life.  And I got to wear huge false eyelashes, tons of glitter, and a crazy dress, which all make me happy.  And yet, the call of cigarettes in the middle of all of that was so huge that I had two.  I haven’t had any today.  But I’m a believer in harm reduction, so it’s not like I believe that having two cigarettes makes the last week a failure, it just means that I had two cigarettes and that makes not having the next one that much harder.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about how I started smoking.  I really became a smoker when I was 19.  I had smoked a little before, as a way to get a rush breaking the rules in boarding school, and I had smoked cloves somewhat at the beginning of college because my girlfriend at the time smoked them and I was impressionable.  But when I really became a smoker, the kind of person who feels the physical need to smoke, I was in a treatment center for depression.  Smoking takes on a special significance in a treatment center.  It happens in the short breaks between the very regimented, and usually soul sucking, activities that take up the day.  And it happened with everyone – the patients and staff – together on this little smoking porch.  The rest of the time, it felt like we were at war with the staff.  To explain what I mean by that would take up way too much time, but suffice to say the staff relished the complete control they had over our lives and how they got to define who we were (I got diagnosed as having an authority problem because I disagreed with a staff person, which is funny because “authority problem” is not a diagnosis).  But on the smoking porch, everyone relaxed a little (which doesn’t mean that what you said out there wasn’t written down in a file).  So though I wasn’t a smoker when I went in, by the time I came out 10 weeks later I had become a full on smoker.  I also smoked a brand that was oddly out of character for my demographic – camel filters.

A few years later I worked in a different kind of treatment center, one focused on AIDS services for homeless people and drug users.  I found that smoking had the same kind of effect there as a staff person as it had when I had started smoking.  The rest of the time I was this young, white, wealthy kid who had huge amounts of power over clients who were mostly much older, poor, people of color.  I’m sure some of my clients hated me and certainly most of them didn’t trust me, for reasons that I agree with.  But the smoking porch, where we all went between the regimented activities that the clients were required to attend in order to receive medical and housing services, allowed those power imbalances to be a little more relaxed (not gone, of course, I still had power over them in various ways and that doesn’t disappear).   It was the only space where I didn’t feel like I was walking around shaking a big set of keys.  It was also the only space where we were allowed to share an actual tangible thing – I could give a client a cigarette and they could give me one.  So for the two years that I worked in AIDS services, smoking became an even bigger part of my life.  (Also, I feel so egocentric using smoking as the way to talk about these larger structural things, but that’s what I’m writing about today, so I’ll just have to live with that feeling.)

But I don’t have those excuses any more.  I don’t work or live in a space where smoking brings people together.  I know almost no one who smokes.  Smoking is gross, my mouth tastes horrible, and when I buy cigarettes I’m giving money to companies that I find despicable.  Most of the time, I don’t even like how smoking feels any more (though sometimes I love it).  The most compelling argument I can make for smoking’s benefits in my life, at this point, is that it’s the easiest way to get someone alone who you’re flirting with.  But my kind of flirting isn’t really subtle anyway, so I should be able to find less subtle ways to spend time alone with someone.

And to tie this to the previous post, I’ve become obsessed with putting my body through extreme pain in the form of bikram yoga as the replacement for cigarettes.  It sort of works, because at least for those 90 minutes I’m so distracted I can’t think about smoking, and then afterward I’m so high for a few hours that smoking seems less important.  I’ve also decided that bikram is training to make me a better bottom, that it’s an expression of my queer, kinky self instead of just a kind of not-smoking virtuousness (because really, I’m not invested in staying virtuous, so that’s not going to work for very long) but that’s a whole other post.

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