I quit smoking a year ago - here's what I learnt

A very old picture of me smoking and dancing and generally being a bit sozzled at uni. I’ve smoked since I was 14

It’s been a year since I smoked a cigarette.

365 days since I heard the flick of the lighter, witnessed the flash of fire, the burble of paper burning and parted my lips to admit the comforting squash of the filter in my mouth. That glory, the delicious torture of a craving about to satisfied, and drawing and blowing the smoke in and out through my body, feeling the slight choke as it hit the back of my throat and the release as nicotine flooded through my bloodstream. I loved it so much I did not think I would ever quit, unless perhaps I got pregnant or ill. I loved it so much it was easy to ignore all possible future consequences. 

I know the heady lure of tobacco. And what it’s like to be on the other end of the self-righteous judgement and fear tactics of the quit-brigade. So I will never try and convince anyone to give it up. I am not in the business of telling anyone what to do, and I am not in the business of rejecting my past. What we do that seems harmful or stupid is always understandable with enough compassion, patience and imagination.  

The best way of finding out what something is doing for you is to stop doing it

What I discovered when I quit smoking was that cigarettes were, for me, a way of hiding.  They were a great way of absenting myself from certain bits of life that I found overwhelming. And like the most clever coping mechanisms do, it also allowed me to avoid the fact I was avoiding it. 

Smoking, for me, was protection. Protection from ‘too much’ intimacy. On all sorts of levels. 

Smoke as a boundary

See, here’s the thing about someone who smokes - it’s very difficult to get close to them. Physically. There’s a cloud around them. An offputtingly strong-smelling cloud. That’s useful if you’re a woman walking around in a crap part of town and you feel afraid. But it’s useful if you’re struggling to hold a boundary in other parts of your life too. You always have the neutral excuse of a craving to escape a tete a tete. You can physically remove yourself to pop out for a cigarette. At parties, if you feel socially overwhelmed, you can disappear to the smoking section. Where the only other people who you need to communicate with are other smokers, who are also surrounded by a protective cloud. It’s a boundary that hides the emotional need for distance. You just say you’re addicted to nicotine. Not that you’re addicted to distraction and isolation as a way of feeling safe. That seems much more taboo. 

How I quit

I believe we don’t give up our protections until we are ready. The process is mysterious. The trigger for me to stop smoking was a nightmare where I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t want to have that nightmare again, and I didn’t want to end up struggling for breath in my later years. I was ready to use this window of opportunity. I had been praying for one, for the motivation to quit, the willingness to be willing. 

Because although I was addicted to the sensory experience of it, it was so out of line with my values it was causing a kind of psychic split in me. Constantly doing something you know isn’t good for you, when you believe in supporting your own health, that you know is a terrible ROI - is really challenging to keep in your awareness. I could be compassionate with the part of myself that was addicted, but I was frustrated too. 

It was a compelling enough dream that I didn’t smoke the next day. I didn’t say I would quit forever, I just made the decision not to smoke a cigarette, one fag at a time. 

I didn’t tell anyone either. I knew quitting was hard and that it was likely I would slip. didn’t want that possibility to make me feel like a failure and to put me off trying again. I was quitting one cigarette at a time, one day at a time, not swearing off fags forever. That idea was too overwhelming. But without too much fanfare, I got a week. The first in 20 years. Then I lit up again. And then the cycle of smoking all the time began again. Then I quit again. 

Obligation, addiction and choice

This on-off continued for a few weeks, until I realised this was the hardest way to do it. I had to go through the physical craving intensity and mental obsession of wanting one, torturing myself over whether I should I one, every time. And although I enjoyed the initial ‘I quite fancy a cigarette, shall I have one?’ titaliation, I soon found that once I had picked up, the sensation of choice disappeared fairly fast. I was back to having to do it after everything or not feeling quite right all the time. This has been one of the most powerful motivators of staying stopped in anything. I like keeping this experience of choice. I do not like feeling obligated in my relationships, least of all having my main relationship to an inanimate object. 

And it was about relationships for me. Within a month of my final cigarette, I was in a romantic relationship (we had known each other prior to this), my first in three years. Something had happened around my willingness to be intimate with someone else.

And of course, the willingness to be intimate with myself. I have never really liked that phrase because I find it a bit hard to understand. But essentially, if you light up every time you meet an uncomfortable feeling - whether that’s easing into waking in the morning, before something to steady yourself, as a ritual to help you manage the mini grief of finishing something, you never really get a chance to sense what’s underneath that. It’s disappeared in a puff of smoke. You get to hide from other people, but you also get to hide your own experience from yourself.  There was quite a lot of loneliness and grief underneath the desire to light up, which makes sense, if for 20 years your coping mechanism for both loving other people and finding it difficult to connect was finding ways to run away and hide behind things. The grief was interesting. It was the reason I used cigarettes for periods of transition - because the ending of one thing and moving into another would trigger an older sense of loss that on some level felt too much and I didn’t feel ready to feel.

The reason I quit smoking, in the end, was that my desire, even need, to be close with other people outweighed my need to protect myself. Because on some level, I now had the ability to see and feel the things I had been unable to witness in myself. I was ready to let people in, to get to know people more, and to make closer friends with myself.