Sixtieth Quit

A Story

2009-07-20T04:39:00.000-07:00

I wanted to tell a story. And it's my symbol. And I know it won't keep me quit - only dedication and discipline over the following days, months, and years can do that - but it creates momentum. And that's what I need right now. Momentum. For tomorrow, my sixty days.

*

It was Summertime in 1993. The gum trees in the bushland near the truck stop crackled. Under her feet, the ground was dry and hard, and the young girl squinted around the sun's white glare. The other passengers scattered around her, waiting with their dim-sims and cans of coke. She took a sandwich out of her bag.

It was her first journey away from home. This wasn't like a school camp or a slumber party. This was ten hours on a bus, all by herself. She had never been alone like this. It melted into her like chocolate - deliciously, deleriously.

On her tinny walkman, The Concert in Central Park played. The track was America. She'd found it in a big box of old tapes in her parents' cupboard. They were her discovery, Simon and Garfunkel. Just for her. And as she sat cross-legged at the wooden picnic table smoking her cigarette, she imagined she was a character in a movie, some sad, sorrowful runaway leaving for the big city: It took me four days to hitchhike for Saginaw.

As Garfunkel's voice rose to crescendo, the girl wrapped her arms around herself. The world was misty in the brightness of the day.

It was a perfect moment.

*

Years passed - five, ten, fifteen. The young girl was now a woman of thirty-one.

On this particular day, the woman was sitting in a stadium in the city of Melbourne. Her younger sister sat beside her, heavily pregnant with her second child, a daughter.

The woman felt nostalgic. She'd been waiting a long time to see Simon and Garfunkel, and though they were old men now, she knew that their voices on this night would send all her past selves rolling back to her like the Old Friends in the song: the girl at a lonely truck stop, the young poet sitting on the grubby doorstep of her city flat, the newlywed puffing dim circles of cigarette smoke into the night air.

She waited for them. And waited.

As America played, her sister reached across to the woman and grabbed her hand. Inside, the baby girl kicked and rolled to the music. And there the woman sat, both hands clasped over her sister's swollen belly.

Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat.
We smoked the last one an hour ago.
So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine,
And the moon rose over an open field.

At that moment the woman realised something. Some things are not about the past. They are about the future.

And Art Gunfunkel sang, his voice rising to crescendo:

We've all come to look for America.

*

Tomorrow my sister is going to be induced.

Baby Milly and I will be beginning our new lives. Together.

Sixty Days

2009-07-20T03:54:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is the day. 21st July. Sixty days.

I wanted a symbol; a lucky charm I could hang onto and know I was never going to smoke again. I wanted finality, some great epiphany to show me that at last, this was it. How do you differentiate between attempts when you've made so many of them? How can you know that this is the attempt you've been working towards for more than three years?

The answer is that you can't. There's no magical solution to addiction. You can't just wake up and have it gone for good, whether you've smoked for five or twenty-five or fifty-five years. It's always going to be there. And the way that alcoholics never drink again is the way I have to never smoke again. Never Take Another Puff.

I've been feeling, increasingly, that I'm now at a crossroads in my life. It's such a cheesy phrase, crossroads. But it's true. I feel like there's two very clear choices in front of me. I'm almost thirty-two years old. It's not an old lady by any means, I know that, but at the same time, I don't have the vitality of youth on my side anymore. I can't just continue to have the lifestyle (with the smoking, lack of exercise etc.) I have and not pay for it. Looking after myself really well is something I have always left for later. Well, it is later. Later starts now.

I started losing weight a year ago because I knew it was either that or face the rest of my life as an overweight person. It was really clear to me. My metabolism changed after I became pregnant with Jasper, and I gained weight quickly. More and more of it, even after he was born. I could see these two disparate visions of my future in front of me quite clearly, almost tangibly.

I now weight about 25 lbs less than I did this time a year ago. I've been rescued from myself.

That's what I want to do here. Invest. There are amazing gains to be had from quitting smoking even now, in the moment. I felt them, just a week ago - the energy, for one - my ability, quite suddenly too, to wrestle with Jasper on the bed, or chase him back and forth up the hallway. And there's the sense of freedom - knowing you don't have to leave some non-smoking place early because you can't bear not having a cigarette for any longer. And there's more.

And that's wonderful. But it doesn't keep me off them. Because you forget quickly how awful it makes you feel, and that one cigarette late at night is easily rationalised away as just one. Though it isn't - it's just the first, no matter how you try to trick yourself into believing otherwise. It's always just the first.

So I need to keep that long-term vision in my head. That it isn't about the one. About just being able to get back on the wagon tomorrow morning. It's about staying there, creating that future self that I want to be.

The self that I see doesn't smoke. She isn't crippled by all the things I am crippled by daily as a smoker. She is balanced, vital, fit - she has the energy to be creative in the way she wants to be. That layer of anxiety (all the nicotine in the world can't ease the withdrawal when you truly smoke!) that coats my life as a smoker doesn't exist for her.

And she doesn't live with all those shadows at the back of her mind. She knows she's forging her future every day, and doing all the right things to make it a positive one.

There's no regret.

2009-07-17T03:38:00.000-07:00

I have about three days left until my sixty days are up.

I thought I wasn't going to need them. About three weeks ago, I stopped smoking. I even got my tatoo.

And then I didn't. Stop. Or I did, for a couple of weeks.

I was doing great. Not a problem. I felt good. And then I went out for a friend's birthday. It was one of those rare nights out in the city, where you can almost pretend there isn't a husband and child waiting for you at home; where almost everyone there is single and childless. And all of them, old smoking buddies. And you drink. And then somehow you wind up with a cigarette in your hand.

It's not an excuse. My retardation is my excuse. Except it isn't an excuse.

I don't think any time I try to quit is going to "be different". I don't think there's any way I can mark whether an attempt is going to be for real. I must be the only person with a tatoo of a non-smoking symbol on their body who dares to light up. So what will stop me? What on earth will stop me, ever?

Only me. I know that. Nothing will "hold me to it". That's something I have to do for myself. Day by day.

And I feel incredibly disappointed with myself; very demoralised. It's amazing what your mind will trick you into to get that fix. The things you will tell yourself about one not hurting etc. etc.

I mustn't listen.

But for now, I need to beat away that fear and get the courage up again. Soon.

I promised myself I would be a non-smoker in sixty days.

2009-06-21T05:50:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine from work told me once: You do know Allen Carr died of lung cancer, don't you?

Wikipedia confirms this, as much as Wikipedia confirms anything. He did die of lung cancer.

But you know, I don't think that discounts anything he wrote about smoking. It doesn't make it irrelevant. It doesn't mean we can all go about our smoky ways thinking there's no point in quitting.

The other reason there is a point- even if a smoking-related illness gets me in the end - is that actually I can't continue to live like this.

It sounds stupid and dramatic. It is.

As a smoker, I'm living this weird kind of half-life. I can't enjoy things. I can't go visit my mum for any length of time without manufacturing an excuse to go off for a cigarette (I'm still in the closet with her). I can't enjoy a full movie without getting edgy. My enjoyment of my work has dropped. I'm not able to exercise properly, I'm not motivated to look after myself well. My back problems have re-emerged because I haven't been good with my physio. My son watches too much television because I have to keep nicking out the front door for a fag. I spend half the time wishing I was smoking and the other half wishing I didn't have to smoke.

I tire myself.

I want to be able to enjoy all of my life. I want the relaxation I remember, the absence of the desire to smoke. The freedom - not having to feel edgy day in and day out. I'm tired of being a slave to it and despising myself for it.

I'm tired of feeling like I don't have control of myself.

Never Too Late

2009-06-14T03:41:00.000-07:00

I think sometimes people don't get around to quitting smoking because they think it's too late.

My husband is one of these people. Actually he's never said that to me at all, or even given me that impression in any active way... but I dunno, I just reckon he is. Never mind that although he's been smoking much much longer than me, we've probably actually smoked the same number of cigarettes in our lives due to how much more heavily I've smoked.

This probably puts me in a similar risk category for the really big baddies.

I'm not really under any illusions about that, though. (This is a lie; I'm just not in as much denial as I could be.) Part of me understands that after seventeen years of self-abuse, an eventual terminal illness as a result of it is not an unlikely scenario. Even if I stop very soon, and for good.

You can't undo that damage. Not completely.

To be honest though, I don't think this changes anything about wanting - or needing - to quit. In fact, it makes my desire to stop stronger.

I think of it this way: If I found out I had lung cancer - ten, twenty, thirty years into the future, the way I would feel about it knowing I had quit smoking would be entirely different to the way I would feel about it knowing I was still a smoker; that I had never stopped.

It's the difference between regret and not-regret. It's knowing you did the best thing for yourself in the end. Even if you made mistakes that have cost you your life ultimately, it's knowing that you tried to rectify them in the best way you could when you had the opportunity.

Anything beyond that can't be helped.

Ramble

2009-06-13T03:24:00.000-07:00

I realised I've been writing an awful lot about the reasons I've continued to go back to smoking. They are so easy to remember, after all. They dig their way into the bones of you, and they are hard to pry away. If I count from the day I first started smoking until now, it's been seventeen years of giving myself those excuses. Seventeen years. It sounds so long. It's horrifying to think about.

But I want to counter them. I want to debunk the crap out of them. Make myself ready, so I know I'm doing the right thing, even though that's obvious. I'm heading towards the halfway point here. It might even be sooner.

It still fills me with a little panic.

The fact is, all smokers do and don't want to stop, whether it's now or some time in a nameless, faceless future. But the thing is, it's never going to get any easier. That day, the one you sometimes hear about, when you miraculously wake up and don't want to smoke anymore - it's never going to happen. It's never going to be easier tomorrow than it is today. Not after exams finish, after you get pregnant, after the holidays, or at the end of this packet.

You just have to suck it up and do it.

For me, that hasn't been the hard bit. Truly, nicotine withdrawal is not that bad. It's a bit edgy - you're not sure what to do with your hands - but it doesn't physically hurt, you know. My headaches hurt a zillion times more. It hurts more to cough up the phlegm in the morning, you know? If you're in the right frame of mind you just go "Ooh, that's not much fun" and go onto the next thing. IF you're in the right frame of mind.

The problem is hanging onto that frame of mind. Because if you're me, what happens is the nicotine is out of your system - all traces of craving have left - and, more importantly - all traces of feeling sick. You are energised, feeling good, making positive steps in all kinds of areas of your life as a result of your having stopped, and then. What? You start to wonder. You start to wonder if it was so bad to be a smoker. What you remember is the long talks, the relief of the first cigarette in the morning, the Reality Bites stuff.

It eats away at you for a while. You don't do it. But it's already there. You haven't been able to hang onto the momentum of your quit; you've forgotten not to take it for granted, to be grateful for what - truly, and I'm not being dramatic - is a second chance at life.

The trouble is the worst of the effects don't start for a while, not till you're back into it regularly, and heavily. So meanwhile, you're holding back, and every single fucking cigarette becomes special to you. Becomes the most valuable thing on earth - you've been waiting since last week for it. None of this helps.

This time, I just admitted it had me right away. All the better for quitting. I could've dragged out the "I'm not a smoker, I just have the occasional puff" bullshit out for months. But what's the point? It all leads to the same thing in the end.

I need to stop, and forever. For good. Like, never put another nicotine product in my body ever again for the rest of my life stop.

There are so many reasons. I don't need to list them here and now, but I'm sure I will at some point, at least as a quick reference.

What I need to remember for the time being is that the truth of smoking is that it is an addiction. We don't really smoke to bond with others, to enjoy ourselves, to deal with stress or any of the rest of it. There are a zillion easier ways to do these things, that don't involve paying money in order to kill yourself slowly.

We smoke to relieve the withdrawals. We smoke so that we won't feel that edginess that we know as "I need a cigarette". When we have one, that feeling goes away. And we are happy. For a little while. Until the next time.

But when the nicotine is out of your system, you don't have that feeling. If the quit isn't going well, you might mope and pine for one, sure, but it isn't the same.

One of the best examples I've considered as to why smoking is really just nicotine addiction wrapped up in our excuses is the experience I had with nicotine patches before I quit smoking the first time. I don't even count it as a quit. It was five days. Five days longer than I'd ever stopped before, but that wasn't the point.

All I remember of that five days was the painlessness of it. I remember driving to work - usually I'd chain-smoke my way down the mountain - and just thinking: Heh. This is really weird. I don't even care that I'm not smoking.

It was a really strange feeling. The absence of needing to smoke. And it just showed me that all the things we say about it being a habit, and being a part of our day and all that stuff... they are all bullshit. It's addiction. That's all it is. If the chemical we want is already there, we don't need to do it. The end. And all the mythology we build up around smoking; that's all it is. Mythology.

Becasue smoking isn't all those mythological things. Not when you really look at it properly. I'm not even talking about cancer and heart disease and emphysema and all the rest. Forget that stuff for a moment. Even just the ritual of it is not all it's cracked up to be.

Since when did smoking turn me into Winona Ryder circa 1994 anyway? When exactly is this smoking so wonderful? Is it when I'm having these long tlaks with friends over glasses of wine? Because, I'm telling you, I didn't even realise I was smoking most of those cigarettes. Is it that first one in the morning, after eight hours of sleep, sitting on the front step with my mug of coffee in my hand? You mean the one that literally made me almost faint this morning because my body couldn't cope with the chemicals?

The reality of being a smoker, it's just not that exciting. It's 30 cigarettes a day of essentially nothing. Unconscious puffing, not even thinking about it. Certainly not sitting there deeply inhaling, thinking: Oh my God, I am sooooo glad I'm a smoker. This is the best thing on earth.

I read this great quote recently which was 'The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco." It's so true.

And it's only the first illusion. There's so many more.

Triggers

2009-06-09T05:50:00.000-07:00

It's amazing how quickly everything I do has become punctuated by smoking this time round. Wake up, have cigarette. Make coffee, have cigarette. Make porridge, have cigarette while it is cooling down. Eat it, have cigarette. I don't even realise I'm doing it.

Allen Carr talks about the triggers for smoking being a series of opposites: Boredom and concentration, stress and relaxation. I'd argue that there doesn't even need to be a trigger for it, but certainly these are the ones it's hardest to imagine being without. And the "combination" cigarettes, where there's two of these emotions at once.

When I try to visualise myself as a non-smoker, certain situations are harder for me to visualise than others. I have no problem imagining day-to-day life without a cigarette - it wasn't hard to adjust myself away from the "habit" of it other times I've quit, because smoking is an addiction, not a habit. And because I want to be free of it so much, I guess. It tires me; I literally find it tiresome.

The real triggers for me are the "combination cigarettes". They're the ones I need to guard myself against, develop strategies to deal with so my reasons for quitting stay on top of my reasons for starting again.

The number one trigger that is difficult for me is getting angry. This one got me to buy my first pack earlier this year when I picked up smoking again. I've never considered myself a particularly "angry" person - it's not something I feel very often (more often since I became a teacher!) and when I do feel it, I most often end up in tears. It's extremely uncomfortable for me to get angry.

Getting angry always makes me want to smoke. Even when I was at my surest, my deepest into being a non-smoker, having an argument with my husband caused me to doubt it for at least a moment.

The second trigger for me is being at social events, around smokers. These days, most of my friends have quit, so these are rare. But they do happen. Usually it's a writer's event of some kind - a poetry reading or the like, and the room is filled with these cool young creative types, all smoking like chimneys. In those moments, it doesn't seem to matter if I have one too. This situation brought me back after the first, and longest time I quit. It's stupid though. I think to myself: it doesn't matter; it's just a cigarette. It's not a matter of life death, but it actually is. It actually is a matter of life and death.

The third trigger is talking.

This one is probably the hardest for me. It's related to concentration, relaxation and stress. It's those talks with friends that go for hours; the long lunch, dissecting love affairs and childhood trauma. The glasses of wine that get slowly and imperceptibly filled and refilled until the bottles are gone and you start in on the coffee.

Those are the times I could just literally smoke non-stop for hours.

In the book, Carr says that it isn't the smoking that's special, though, it's the occasion. And this is absolutely true. It was a revelation to me to realise, when I was a non-smoker, that I actually just liked sitting at outdoor tables in cafes for the sake of it, not just because they were the only areas I was allowed to smoke in. Likewise, time spent talking with friends was no less pleasurable because I didn't have a cigarette in my hand.

It was the same time.

That's what's hard to get when you smoke. Life doesn't just change. You aren't a different breed of person because you don't smoke. Things continue; you are the same. Lying on a beach is still lying on a beach whether or not you have a cigarette in your hand. It's still nice.

And probably nicer in many, many ways.

Fear

2009-06-08T06:54:00.000-07:00

I am swinging, these days, between fears.

On the one hand, there is the fear that I will keep smoking. The fear that I will spend my life feeling de-energised, living that half-life of the smoker that stops me from exercising, eating well, and working with freedom and productivity. I fear never being free of the endless, draining slavery of it, and I fear the consequences to my health - of contracting a dreadful illness, and knowing I caused it, and I didn't do anything to prevent it.

On the other hand is the fear of giving up smoking.

Only I'm not entirely sure what that fear is. Especially when I've given up before, and I know it doesn't hurt, and that life goes on, and that in fact - it's more than life going on; it's life being better. And it's only once I put nicotine into my body again that the slippery slope begins - the questioning, the craving.

I guess I'm afraid of failure. I'm afraid of forgetting how it makes me feel and falling back into the trap again. I'm afraid I'll never be free from it. I'm afraid that life will never be the same again; that I'll never be able to enjoy myself, that I'll always be craving a cigarette and fighting this endless battle of wills with myself until I finally succumb and have one, and I'll talk myself into believing it doesn't matter. Then the self-loathing, of course, of being weak as piss. And then continuing to feel like shit 24/7 for the rest of my life.

It's all absolutely illogical. Both of these fears are driven by my desire to not smoke. Logically, they're the same thing. Fear of feeling the way a smoker feels all the time.

When you're a non-smoker, you don't feel the daily desperation, the panics, the irrational need to get outside and have a puff right now. That's what a smoker feels, not a non-smoker. And the absence of that feeling, once you've quit - God, it's such a relief. Honestly, it is.

I must never allow myself to take that for granted when my sixty days is up.

Getting Away

2009-06-03T05:14:00.000-07:00

For many years, I thought about quitting smoking and thought to myself: But what will I dooooo?

Always the fidgeter, smoking seemed to provide me with some form of out when I was nervous in a social situation. I felt it gave me an opportunity to take a break from working -- it was my reward for finishing my homework all through my last two years in high school. Smoking was a breather, a moment grabbed just for myself in the messy, mundane chaos of my life.

But what will I haaaaave?

I thought there would be no reason to take that time. What I realised, once I became a non-smoker, was that I didn't need that reason. Not that I didn't need breaks; of course not that. But that my desire for a break, the edginess of must-leave-work and my inability to concentrate any further was nothing to do with needing a moment.

It was everything about needing a cigarette.

You see, cigarettes get the credit for a lot of things. You think they calm you down, you think they help you to concentrate again, make it possible for you to return to some tense situation with a clearer head. But if you didn't have that little nicotine addiction poking you hard in the belly, you wouldn't feel so tense to begin with. You wouldn't need to get the fuck out right now.

I know this from experience.

Allen Carr talks about the way that smokers are constantly striving to get back to the "state of peace of being a non-smoker". This is absolutely true, glib as it sounds. We don't enjoy cigarettes; we get relief from them.

But if we were non-smokers, we wouldn't need the relief. That's the crazy thing. There'd be no nicotine levels inside us to drop to a quarter within the hour, or whatever the random fact says.

As a non-smoker, I love my work. Not so much as a smoker. As a smoker, my work detracts from my oh-so-important smoking time, leaving me irritated, unable to fully concentrate, and hanging out for lunchtime. Talk about a drop in productivity. It seriously sucks.

I'm looking forward to experiencing the world as a non-smoker again. It's no fun living with a layer of stress covering so much of your daily world, leaving you sitting around waiting for the moment you can get away and have a cigarette.

The Headaches

2009-06-01T05:05:00.000-07:00

I've had a fun few days, me.

Thursday I came down with one of my headaches. It didn't leave, truly, until late this afternoon.

And I need to write about it, because it's something I need to remember. And it's so hard to remember pain.

My headaches, when they come, last several days. The longest took about ten days to go away. If I'm lucky, I can knock down a couple of Nurofen, and they don't come back till next time. But most often, I'm looking at about two or three days of it.

This one was a mofo. It had me nauseous, and feverish, and seeing white spots on sheets of paper. Had I been in one of my OCD phases, I would have been out there googling "brain tumour symptoms". Except I could barely drag my butt around the house, only to put the espresso pot on the stove.

It really hurt.

The headaches I get focus themselves behind my eyes. The ache is heavy and rock-hard there, as if my sockets are closing in on my eyeballs with a tiny adjustable wrench. They send little fuzzy probes tendrilling painfully into the sinuses behind the bridge of my nose. They stretch out and up at the edges of my brows and arc redly into my temples, usually on one side more than the other. And then they band over the top of my head, right up to the crown, making my scalp tingly and sore, as if it was 1987, and I had had my hair in a high ponytail all day for a Jazz Ballet concert.

But it isn't funny. It exhausts me. When I have a headache, I can't imagine not having one, and when I don't have one, I can't imagine having it.

On the way home from visiting my sister yesterday, I thought I was going to die on the hour-long journey home. (No, I wasn't driving.) It was like a movie. I kept closing my eyes to try and sleep, then thinking "We must be nearly there", and opening my eyes only to find we were on the same stretch of road, ten seconds after I last looked. Meanwhile, the daylight was boring holes into my brain and there was a two-year-old screaming the lyrics to Livin' On A Prayer right next to my head, and whacking me, saying "Mummy! Wake up!"

An interminable journey.

But do you know, when I was a non-smoker, I didn't get any headaches. I stopped getting them.

A logical person would say "Hmm... this little stick of leaf wrapped in paper is making me sick. I better not set it on fire and put it in my mouth."

However, smokers are not logical people. We will do anything to get our hit.

You know, there's certain advantages to having quit smoking in the past, and ultimately failing at it. One of these advantages is that you get to see how it is as a non-smoker. You don't notice at the time - the recovery is gradual. But if you go back to smoking? Fuck me, do you feel it.

Forget this "it will kill me one day" bullshit. Smoking does so much to you here, now, in the moment. You're not even aware of it. You think it's normal. I thought, for years, that I was just a really low-energy person. I'm not the most active, vital one in the bunch at the best of times, let's face it - but I had no idea my smoking was playing such an immense hand in that.

It wasn't until I "came back" that I really made the connection. And I need to hang onto it. Hard.

Smoking Mythology

2009-05-30T08:18:00.001-07:00

Ben Stiller has a lot to answer for. His first film as a director, Reality Bites, which came out in 1994, is solely responsible for the romanticising of my smoking throughout my teen years, and even throughout my early twenties.

I'm sure you remember the scene where the Janeane Garofalo character has been to get an AIDS test and says the thing about Melrose Place and halter tops with chokers. You probably remember where Ethan Hawke plays the Violent Femmes song with his band Hey, That's My Bike and they edit out the swear word.

You might, however, not remember how prominently cigarettes featured in the film. Not unless you watched it at least fifty times like I did.

I came into the world at the tail end of Gen X. I was fifteen when grunge fashion became popular, and sixteen when Kurt Cobain died. And I was never a kid who wanted to be younger - I always, always wanted to be older. That film - it was like the ultimate fantasy of what I wanted to be one day.

There's one scene in particular that I remember. (Apologies for hideous picture. Streaming media + screencast software + second upload = bad quality. I'm sure there's a better way, but I don't know what it is... This is like those tapes of tapes of tapes we used to play in our cars.)

Did you hear it? Can smoking seem any more appealing than that?

In his book, Allen Carr talks about the way we are "brainwashed" by our own addictions, daily reinforcing the wrong-headed beliefs we hold about it. And how we block our minds to the reality of smoking, living in this hazy mist of justifications.

I don't think he explicitly talks about smoking mythology - but that's what I call it. Smoking mythology is what calls out to us again once we have quit; it builds up that appealing, alluring, romantic vision of cigarettes, and before you know it, the fog has settled in... and in the moment, you can't even manage to conjure up your reasons for giving up. You can't grasp them at all.

That's how I got here again: "You and me and five bucks."

Then there was the Writer Thing. All writers smoke, you know that, don't you? And more importantly, certainly all poets smoke. Yeah. They all sit in cafes in the middle of the night, alone, as groups of friends and couples dribble back from their nights out. But there they are, shivering, pen in one hand, cigarette in the other, writing genius. Or I know. There they are, standing on the footpath, waiting for a bus in the most bohemian and artistic part of a big city. It is cold, they are wearing a coat and hat, and they are holding a cigarette. And you can't tell whether it's smoke or steam coming out of their mouths, it's just this endless, wafting, white curl.

It's the comforting, chocolatey smell of a packet of Drum. It's the bronze, engraved cigarette case. It's the long night with an old friend, talking talking talking. It's road trips, and sunlight, and it's when you're sad too - it's comfort when you're grieving.

To a smoker, smoking is all of these things. And more. And their own.

But it's never what it really is. It isn't the awful rusty taste in your mouth in the morning, the nicotine-stained fingers, or the look on your child's face when they are calling you to come inside.

It isn't the money, the smell, the cough, or the disease.

No matter how much realer they are.

FMI:

2009-05-25T09:01:00.000-07:00

Chapter 6

"Nicotine... is the fastest addictive drug known to mankind... It is a quick-acting drug, and levels in the bloodstream fall quickly to about half within thirty minutes of smoking a cigarette and to a quarter within an hour of finishing a cigarette." (p. 15)

"There is no physical pain in the withdrawal from nicotine. It is merely an empty, restless feeling, the feeling of something missing." (p. 15)

"The enjoyment that the smoker gets from a cigarette is the pleasure of trying to get back to the state of peace, tranquility and confidence that his body had before he became hooked in the first place." (p. 16)

"The real reason why every smoker goes on smoking is because of that little monster inside his stomach."(p.19)

The Beginning

2009-05-25T07:16:00.000-07:00

One of the first clear arguments Allen Carr puts forward in his book is to do with the reasons we start smoking in the first place. His description of this - and it may be more a symptom of the books datedness than anything else - simply does not fit with my experience of starting smoking.

I never started because of the "brainwashing" of figure from films: "The Humphrey Bogart / Clint Eastwood" image, or the idea that smoking would make me a "sophisticated, modern young lady" (p. 11). For much of my life, cigarette advertising passed me by. (I do recall the appealing tropical beach of the "Fresh is Alpine" billboards though, the white linen of its happy, carefree couple and remember remarking to my horrified mother how I wanted to be them.)

Likewise, I never had to "work hard" to become a smoker. I never actually wanted to be a smoker. My aunt was a smoker. I saw her as this hideous Kath and Kim (though it was pre-Kath and Kim, obviously) figure, who bought paraphernalia like beachtowels emblazoned with the name of her favourite brand. She borrowed a shirt of mine once when I was about thirteen, and it smelled like cigarettes for weeks afterwards. I hated it.

No, the romanticised images I've built up about smoking over the years were all fed by my own addiction.

My first cigarette was at a party at a boy called Mark's house. His last name rhymed with "Buttock", which we found amusing. I was fifteen years old.

In fact, it wasn't even a cigarette that I smoked, it was a Beedie. Beedies look like this. You get them - well, you used to get them - from those Indian imports stores that sell pillowcases with embroidered elephants on them, and cheesecloth dresses and things like that. It's actually a rolled up tobacco leaf, tied with a little piece of pink cotton.

I remember hesitating when my friend asked me if I wanted one. From memory I'd been resisting for some time. I recall quite strongly the moment I said I would: my justification that it "wasn't a cigarette", something I held onto for a number of months.

And I don't think it was the fear of not being accepted that made me say yes. Possibly that was the root cause, but if so, it certainly wasn't something that I was aware of. No. what lured me in was the promise of a headspin. A literal headspin. "It will give you a headspin," was what she said.

This was long before any of us discovered recreational drug-taking. We had to get our kicks where we could.

We'd been spending our time, in fact, trying to make ourselves pass out by crouching on the floor against a wall and making ourselves hyperventilate, then standing up very quickly, and having a friend press on our chests.

So yes, the beedie. Do you know, I never coughed. Never spluttered. Never embarrassed myself. I inhaled like the best of them from the word go. My lungs were made for smoking, apparently.

But I did get a headspin.

So smoking was always easy for me. I never had to tell myself I wouldn't get hooked becasue I hated it so much. Because I didn't. I liked it. Just loved the feeling of my brain cells telling me to please give them more oxygen instead of that poisony nicotine stuff. And from the word go, it was a special treat - something to do after I'd listened all the way through the ten-minute live version of The Doors' The End. Or at 3am, when I'd wake up, and secretly climb out my bedroom window and sit on the roof.

I was such a good girl in so many other ways. I was grateful to have this secret.

I just never expected it to stay with me for seventeen years.

FMI:

2009-05-24T06:30:00.000-07:00

"The whole business of smoking is like wandering into a giant maze. As soon as we enter the maze, our minds become misted and clouded and we spend the rest of our lives trying to escape." (p. 12)

It's a good analogy, it really is.

When you're a smoker, you never really look at it with a clear head.

That would be too devastating.

My Smoking History

2009-05-23T11:02:00.000-07:00

I have always been a heavy smoker.

Not always; I lie. In the early days I wasn't. I remember walking home from school one day during Year 12, through the bushland at the back of my parents' house, bag heavy with textbooks. I remember stopping on a rock - hiding in the scrub, really - to have a cigarette before I got home, and thinking to myself: Far out, I've had seven cigarettes today. That is not good.

I wonder if that was the moment I realised it had got me, that the statement I'd been making to everyone ("I smoke, but I'm not a Smoker.") was untrue.

In the the years that followed this, it just got heavier and heavier.

At some points in my life, I smoked up to 60 a day. I'm not exaggerating. And in any serious smoking period of my life - this one included - I have never smoked less than thirty or thirty-five. This is absolutely true. I switched to rollies when I was nineteen, because I couldn't afford to smoke tailor-made cigarettes anymore. And then, after that, I started buying those hideous bags of illegal tobacco (chop-chop, they call it here), where you come out of tobacconist with a plastic bag containing an empty cigarette carton stuffed with this enormous half-kilo brick of shredded tobacco. It's all very covert; you have to wait till everyone's out of the shop to ask for it.

For many years, my heavy smoking didn't seem to effect me. Or I thought it didn't. I put the headaches down to stress and my "neck issue". I considered that I was "naturally" thin. I thought my lack of energy was due to just not being a very sporty person. I truly defined myself as a smoker - one boyfriend said that he thought of me as some kind of sassy, chain-smoking, fast-talking poet chick, and it helped - made the image of myself as a confirmed, hardcore smoker more appealing.

So I never really thought about quitting smoking, not seriously. Oh, I lasted out till eleven o' clock one day once, but it wasn't something I thought about. It was for later.

I stopped, for the first time, almost three and a half years ago, about a month after my husband and I received the sudden news that we were going to have to use IVF in order to get pregnant. The lump of paperwork they gave us at the clinic made it pretty clear that my being a smoker would effect our chances of the treatments being successful.

And I guess I wasn't prepared to mess with that.

The past three and a half years have just been an endless cycle of quitting, flirting, stopping, starting, flirting and quitting again. Some quits lasted a long time. Like I said, two of them lasted quite a long time. Not a long time in terms of one's entire life, of course, but time stretches when you're facing a quit, if you're not entirely sure you want to be. It stretches out eternally in front of you, like this bleak, unending cigarette-less existence.

Which is insane.

I used to say, a long time ago, that if I ever stopped for twenty-four hours - like if I was on a plane, for example - I would never go back to smoking. I honestly thought that that was all it would take. I didn't realise then, that it isn't the nicotine that's the biggest problem, it's what you believe about the nicotine.

I've gone 24 hours countless times since my first quit in 2006.

Whatever. Days, weeks, nothing. Quitting isn't the hard part. Allen Carr points out in his first chapter that we stop smoking every time we put a cigarette out. We are not-smoking for a large part of the day. We are not-smoking at night-time. The question then, becomes: why do we go back for each cigarette? Why do we continue to do it? What do we get out of it?

And I'm not being rhetorical. Honestly. What?

Welcome

2009-05-21T10:05:00.000-07:00

Here I am. Again.

I didn't mean to be. It hadn't even been bothering me. I remember sitting one night late last year at a table in an outdoor beer garden, a rare night out with the women in my mother's group. There were six or seven of us there. We were drinking wine, and laughing - hooting really, like the tables of nurses or teachers you sometimes see in restaurants, when you look over from your pasta, wishing they would just shut up.

That was us. I remember sitting at that table, and having it occur to me that I didn't have any desire to smoke. It was completely gone. And being filled with this deep contentedness that I had finally kicked it.

And then I brought it back.

I held off the regular smoking for a while this time. I told myself that one here and there didn't count. I wasn't smoking regularly; I wasn't finding myself filled with that smoker's panic; I didn't even think about it during the day.

But I should have just admitted it right away. It might have helped me to remember how it really is: the chronic headaches, the sore gums/chest/throat, the sheer and crippling lethargy. And that awful feeling of lying, when you sneak away from work and hide behind a wall like a naughty teenager, thinking "My God, woman, you are thirty-one years old. You're an IDIOT."

So here I am again. This coming attempt will be the third "real" time I've quit smoking. I'm not counting the three-weekers, the three-dayers and the three-hourers I have put myself through before each of these times, the quit attempts which failed spectacularly and left me wallowing in bruised confidence.

But this time I'm making a deal of it. And I'm going to try to get through this mess of a brain of mine and try to figure out why I do it. It's going to take time.

But it's better to spend sixty days on it and get it right.