To be continued

Well, it's been a while since I've managed a new post dear reader, and for that I apologize.  I've been tinkering with this post for a while now, and releasing it for unlucky week 13 seemed an appropriate gesture. 

What was the worst part?

I often wondered before I quit what the worst part would be.  I pictured my trainspotting nightmares; I imagined my road rage.

I've thought about that question a lot now that I feel like I'm over the hump.  I look back at those first few days, those first few weeks, and I ask myself what was the worst, what was the closest I came to smoking.

I have a few moments to chose from.  I have the wake of a friend who died about 10 days after I quit.  I have the funeral of a dear friend's father a few days after that.  I have angry moments dealing with a particularly impossible wood supplier.  I have a sequence of fairly emotional events that you'd think would provide my "worst day" scenario.

They don't.

My worst day is so much more banal.  There's an important truth in that: sometimes, it really is banal to quit.

My worst day was somewhere between day 5 and 6 (it was hard to determine exactly which day counted as which, since I stopped smoking on GDT and promptly returned to MDT).  I was at work, sitting at my desk, thinking about how easy it would be to walk to the corner, buy a pack of smokes, and just put this whole thing to rest.  At that point, no one knew that I was trying to quit: I hadn't told my friends or colleagues, and my partner was safely tucked away in Australia for 2 weeks in case I turned into a monster.  I told myself over and over again: no one will know.  You can try it again later.  Next week.  Next month. No one will know.

I scoured the internet looking for information and help on how to resist my diabolical rationalizations.  I found all of the predictable materials: breathe deeply (are you kidding me??); get some exercise (pffft...); have a glass of water (oh, f*&k right off).

Somehow, in reading all of that advice, I realized that I could not trick myself out of this particular craving.  Trickery might be a great strategy that could work in any number of contexts, but it was far too weak for what was going on in my body and my mind.  All of those strategies were nothing but cheap tricks.  The sleight of hand was not going to succeed this time.  I would need to understand this before I could fight it.

So I thought about what was going in my mind: what kinds of excuses was I making?  What did that excuse try to cover over?  What were my excuses obscuring?

Here's what I figured out.  I had somehow imagined quitting smoking to be an event.  In preparing myself for it, thinking through it in advance, coming up to the actual moment when I put out my last cigarette, all of that time, and for about 5 days afterward, I had thought about it an event.  It was something I would do at the appointed time.

But here's the rub.  After 5 days, all I could think was: okay, I did it.  That was nice.  I'm done now.

I did not think of it, or prepare for it, as something I would be stuck with forever.  (The addiction platitudes chirpily tell me to do it one day at a time.  I call b*&lsh*t.  That's a cheap street trick and I'm not falling for it.) Yes, this thing I had done, I was stuck with it for-e-ver.  Suddenly it was like an ill-advised one-night stand.  It seemed like a good enough idea at the time, but now it's morning and I don't want breakfast, I want you to call a cab. 

Now maybe if I had thought through this particular wrinkle I wouldn't have had the kahones to quit in the first place.  If I had thought soberly, in the clear light of day, that I would need to do this every single day, every god-damned day, in perpetuity, perhaps my resolve would have faded, my courage abated: the endless string of days, stretched out before me, each  just like the last. You will never smoke again. You are stuck with this forever.

So, you ask, how did you make it through that feeling?  I told myself that if I really wanted to, all I needed to do was reach into my pocket for some nicotine gum.  If I really needed a cigarette, I could have a piece.  I took it out, turned it over in my fingers, thought about how it would feel and what I would get out of it.

And then I put it back in my pocket -- not because I wanted to stay nicotine free, but because I finally understood.  The need I was feeling was not a need to smoke.  I couldn't stem the feeling with some nicotine and move on.  Instead, I finally saw that the need I was feeling was the need to be a smoker.  I was feeling my lost future.  I was longing for all of the  cigarettes in my life I wouldn't smoke.

That loss was too huge to contemplate before I quit.  It is still huge to contemplate.  But I think it marks a tipping point: the point where we can extrapolate from individual cigarettes, cravings, habits, and really think about what it might mean to be a non-smoker.  To be something different.

I've been something different now for thirteen weeks.  I don't miss the actual smoking anymore.  In truth though, I still miss being a smoker.  But I'm working on it.

Suckage Part 2

If you missed my post on gaining weight as one of the things that sucked when I quit smoking, I highly recommend reading it before this post.  Not to brag, but it does such a nice job of setting up the indignant, slightly bitter tone that the whole "suckage" theme is going to draw on.  The truth is that, about some things at least, I am indignant; I am bitter.

The glorious narratives of quitting put stars in my eyes.  Everything would be better when I quit.  Everything.  Everything. I feel a bit like Dorothy as she approached the Emerald City: the beautiful promise shimmering on the horizon, luring me, when all of a sudden, bam!  Poisoned poppies.  Crazy flying monkeys.  Witches castles.  Not so fast my pretty, not so fast.

The ugly truth is that I don't really feel any different.

You heard me.  I don't really feel any different, and that sucks.

Now I can hear what's going through your mind. Many of you are feeling the need to encourage me anyway, tell me that I will feel better, that I need to give it time.  Please resist that urge.  PLEASE.  I do not reveal this particular truth as a way of soliciting sympathy or encouragement.  (In fact, I can be very good at asking for sympathy and encouragement  quite directly when I need them.)  I'm not interested in sugarcoating this and lying to myself or others. I appreciate that when other humans are experiencing suckage our natural reaction is to try and make things better.  That's not what I'm after and I implore you to resist.  What I want in this space is to be simply and brutally honest, especially about what sucks.

The truth: I don't feel any different.  I'm slightly more fidgety I hear; I'm also a little more chatty if various reports are to be believed.  So, it's not that there has been no change whatsoever -- it's just that the changes have not been of the physical variety.  Now perhaps my expectations were too lofty, but I had expected to feel, well, something.  (I mean, I'm supposed to be growing new cilia by now for god's sake!)  I thought I might have more energy; I thought I might not get winded as quickly climbing stairs; I thought my skin would improve.

But no.  Nada.  Nothing.  Eleven weeks along and the only difference is that my occasional morning smoker's cough has vanished. More energy? I could use a nap right now and it's not even lunch time.  Increased lung capacity? Hockey practice continues to turn my lungs inside out. Improved skin? The forty-something I-want-wrinkles-and-zits-and-age-spots-all-in-the-same-place mockery continues unabated.

So I continue to wait patiently for the promised improvements to my body.  At my most philosophical, I think that perhaps I will just stay the same, and my eventual middle-aged decline will simply be slower than it might otherwise have been. I remind myself that increased energy is just a bonus and that reducing my risk of lung cancer is the real benefit.  I think about having the heart of a non-smoker within 10 years and my skin doesn't seem so monumental.

But it's hard to be philosophical all the time.  After all, I haven't even noticed my teeth getting whiter. 

Two months and my teeth aren't even getting whiter?

Dude, that's just mean.

Cool Turkey

If you're a regular reader of my blog, you'll know that I quit essentially cold turkey, though I hadn't really planned it that way.  Yes, "essentially."  By essentially, I mean that I chewed two pieces of nicotine gum in the first two days of quitting.  At the time, I didn't really have a strong opinion about whether I was going to use the gum or not.  I always had some around for long flights, so I didn't need to actually choose to get some.  The first piece got me through the 11 hours of travel on day 1.  The second piece got me through day 2 at my desk.  That's when I decided that I wanted to go without.  I had read that the nicotine essentially leaves your body after 3 days, and I thought, well, if I keep on with the gum, 3 days will never get here, so I'll give it a try.

My deal with myself was simple: carry the gum with you; if you're tempted to actually smoke, then chew some (I haven't yet).  After about two weeks I stopped carrying the gum with me.  It has now been two months and it still sits on my dresser, just in case.  I promise I'll blog about it if/when I throw it away.  It's sitting right on top of my prescription for Champex, which I also obtained before quitting as a backup plan, just in case. 

There's a lot of "just in case" in my story of quitting; there are a lot of deals that I've made with myself.

Why, exactly?

Because I'm old enough to know that plans fail.  Simple as that.  Like relationships, governments, or the banking industry, sometimes plans just fail.  Being able to redirect in those moments of failure, though, that's the key to getting through.  The truth is that I wanted to quit smoking.  I didn't really care how I did it, as long as it was the easiest route that was available to me at the time.  It's like navigating in a strange city: you look at the map and you figure out a reasonable route from Point A to Point B.  Sometimes your route works like a charm; sometimes though, you need to improvise on the way because the map only tells part of the story.  I had an idea about how to get from Point A (smoker) to Point B (non-smoker), but I needed to know that I could change my route if I suddenly found myself  trying to cross a freeway on foot.

It's not just that plans fail though.  I needed my Plan Bs and my Plan Cs and all of my deals with myself as a way of preserving a sense of choice.  I'm a woman who likes to feel like she's in control of her own destiny, and creating options is one way to do that.  You see, I need to know that I can, and then I can choose that I won't.  Can't just doesn't work for me.  Never has.  I know myself well enough to know that my immediate, visceral reaction to "you can't" is "watch me."  Right or wrong, pleasant or unpleasant, that's just who I am and that's what I had to work with.

So instead, I created a world of "you can"s.  If you need to, you can do this.  If you need to, you can do that.

Twice, I needed to.  Twice I did.  Big deal.

I'm not invested in exactly how cold my turkey was.  I'm just invested in creating the conditions that make it easier for me not to smoke. The way I figure it, the more conditions I create, the better my odds are.

The Shape of the Relapse Curve

Huh? The shape of the what??

The shape of the "relapse curve" my friends.  That's medical-speak for "when do people cave?"

I don't know about you, but that question was hugely important to me in the first few weeks after quitting.  Particularly in the first two weeks, when I was obsessively looking for any scrap of information that would explain things to me, I wanted desperately to know where I stood.  I still think it's a reasonable thing to want to know.  Here is the information that is easy to find: 95% of people who try to quit smoking on their own are unsuccessful.  Ouch.  But that raises a pretty basic question in a quitter's mind: When does that happen?  Do 50% of people give in on day 1?  Do 75% of people make it for a month before they can't take it anymore?  If I make it through day 3 (when the nicotine is actually gone from my bloodstream) am I well on my way?  What are my odds of success right now?

Please read those questions again.  They make sense, right?  They are not the musings of some mad genius, nor are they the product of deeply held ignorance?  They mark me as neither an idiot savant nor an idiot proper?  I'll assume your silence means that you agree.  They seem to me painfully obvious questions.

Apparently though, no one has actually asked them in any systematic way.  Yes, you read that right.  No one.  Trust me, I have the advanced research skills that come with graduate degrees.  I also have access to the second largest research library in Canada, a library that serves both a medical school and a university hospital.  The dearth of information is downright shocking.  (Note to medical researchers everywhere: there's a big comprehensive, well funded study here just waiting to happen).

Here is what I did manage to find.  One article:  "Shape of the relapse curve and long-term abstinence  among untreated smokers."  I won't quote at length from the article, but I'll share the two most important results: "There is a paucity of studies reporting relapse curves of self-quitters" and "Cessation studies should report relapse curves."

It's actually an interesting read for the information it does manage to collect, as well as for the gaping holes it identifies in smoking cessation research.  The authors did what is called a meta-study -- that is, they took a bunch of data from other large-scale studies, mashed it together, and asked a new question of it.  The article largely focuses on what they were unable to find.

For one, not a single one of the studies they identified actually started with a group of smokers who intended to quit, and then followed them through the process.  Each study relied on a retrospective report from its subjects.  More alarmingly though, there was no standard definition among the studies of what constituted a "relapse."  Some defined it as any nicotine use, even if that meant one drag, once, in the course of an entire year.  Others defined it as a relapse to "regular" smoking.  (I have since learned that there is an entire ideological firestorm surrounding what might constitute success, or a relapse.  Stay tuned for my take on that whole load of baggage.)

Rumour has it that smoking related illness costs billions of dollars a year in health care costs alone.  I can't quote you figures, but it's common knowledge that huge amounts of money are spent studying smoking cessation.  How is it even conceivable that this fundamental question has not been asked: when do the odds tip in my favour?  This is such a colossal oversight that it tempts me to conspiracy theories.  What is it that the NRT industry doesn't want me to know?

What they don't want you to know is that the relapse curve is more like a relapse cliff.  According to this study, approximately 90% of smokers who relapse do so within the first 8 days.  8 days!  The remaining 10% of relapsers adopt a leisurely pace and spread themselves fairly evenly from day 8 to day 180.

Now, if there was a true and deeply felt desire to actually help people quit smoking (on the part of anyone -- government, non-profits, big pharma, whatever), would you not lead with that?

If you can make it through 8 lousy days, your chance of success is 90%.

8 days.

90%

Ninety freakin' percent!!!

Now why do you suppose the statistic we're bombarded with most often is that 95% of people who try to quit on their own will not succeed?

You can have your 95%.  I'm very satisfied with my 90 thank you very much.

Ain't it Grand?

1000 cigarettes not smoked.

In case you're curious, this is what 1000 butts looks like.

Sometimes it just sucks

Mostly this had been a bit of a feel good blog.  It has traced the ways that quitting smoking has been easier than I had imagined; it has analyzed some of the lucky habits I developed before quitting that were a significant help to me.  But I'm no Pollyanna and I promised you the truth in this blog.  The truth is: sometimes it sucks -- deeply, thoroughly, and wholeheartedly sucks.

There is so much significant suckage when you quit smoking that it's hard to know where to start.  So, let's start with the big one: gaining weight.  It is a fact, and if you're not prepared for that fact then you're seriously damaging your chances of success.  I was only partly prepared for it (you'll sense my bitterness over this as the post progresses), but I'm still persuaded that quitting was worth it.  After all, I can easily begin the gradual plan to take the weight off (I'm big on the gradual plan).  Still, right now, I'm coming to the sad and inevitable conclusion that I was no exception to the rule.  I am not special.  I am not exceptional.  In this regard, I am brutally normal.  And that truth sucks.

Now, perhaps you're one of those one-in-a-thousand freaks who doesn't gain weight when they quit smoking.  If that's you, please go back to your gym-bunny life and feel as smug as you like.  We're all happy for you (not).  For the rest of us though, the truth hurts.  My weight gain has pushed significantly into the double digits (with no plateau in sight).  I now have only spotty access to most of my favourite pants.  Sure this is partly an issue of vanity, but it's also an issue of economics.  I can't afford to outfit myself in a new professional wardrobe a size or two larger.  Or at least that's what I tell myself when i can't stand my own vanity for another moment.

There are both physical and behavioural reasons for gaining weight when you quit smoking.  The physical reason is the lack of nicotine in your system.  Removing the constant stimulant from your body simply slows everything down.  There's nothing you can do about that except try to speed it up again with exercise.  If everything else remains identical, you will gain weight when you quit smoking because of this.

But everything else doesn't exactly remain identical. I was seized by the munchies when I quit smoking.  Not hunger, not a desire for hand-to-mouth action as I had read about elsewhere, but serious, full scale munchies.  True munchie connoisseurs understand that munchies are not about eating, they are about chewing -- about feeling the never ending flavour and texture of something not just in your mouth but between your teeth.  There is no satisfaction quite like the feeling when your teeth actually itch.  I was prepared for hunger and habit, but who can resist a full-on onslaught of the munchies?

I made a deal with myself that for the first week or so after I quit I could eat whatever I wanted.  Anything to push me over the hump was going to be fine by me.  Unfortunately, I ended up at Costco a mere two days after quitting.  Aisle upon aisle of bulk candy, in massive quantities, of every type.  I've managed to block out much of the bulk eating I did in order to satisfy my munchies.  What I can tell you with certainty though is that I left Costco that day with a box of Mentos (containing 24 individual rolls) and two 1 kg bags of dried mangoes.

I think they lasted a week.

I have since branched out though, into such treats as Smartfood (I think I'm averaging a half bag a day), scotch mints (a kilo bag, gone in about 4 days), chocolate bars (too numerous to count), and endless pots of yogurt when I'm trying to be "good."  When I run out of snack food, I turn to cereal, or toast and jam, or even, in desperation, entire boxes of crackers.  I laugh at the suggestion of healthy snacks.  Crunchy carrots?  Seriously?  Do you think my munchies are that stupid?

This has now been going on for 2 months and something will need to give.  I keep hearing George Clooney's voice from Up in the Air saying "I have a number in mind but I haven't reached it yet."  Well, I have a number in mind and I have surpassed it.  (It shouldn't surprise you to learn that I'm writing this with a butterscotch sucker in my mouth.)

I have no strategy but patience to deal with this particular phenomenon.  So far, the munchies have outsmarted me.  I don't have enough willpower to watch what I eat, or to dedicate myself to getting enough exercise to make a difference.  Sorry hips, but my willpower is otherwise occupied.  It sucks, but you'll just have to get used it.

One day, hopefully sooner rather than later, I'll get as fed up with the snacking as I did with the smoking and I'll make it stop.  In the meantime though, I did resist the giant bucket of Cow's toffees when I was at Costco last week.  Sure, I bought two more kilos of mangoes, but it's progress right?

Breaking the habit

We all know that quitting smoking is both chemical and behavioral.  On the one hand, our bodies are addicted to nicotine and the countless other chemicals cigarettes contain.  On the other hand, we smoke in routinized and predictable way.  Smoking makes us feel things because we've taught ourselves to feel them as we smoke.  The combination of chemical addiction and behavioural habit makes quitting smoking hard; deal with both of them or you're in trouble.

I might have titled this post "Sometimes you get lucky II" because again, dumb luck set me up for some good success on the behavioral front.  Here's what I mean.

For a long time I thought I might just gradually quit smoking.  I'd cut down slowly until eventually the habit and the addiction would just fade away and I'd never smoke again.  And by gradually, I mean gradually.  You have no idea how deeply patient I am.  This was not a week-by-week plan.  It was not even a month-by-month plan. My idea of quitting gradually was implemented over something of an 8-year span.  Yes, you read that right: 8 years.  The plan seemed logical to me, except that by the time I got down to a half a pack a day I hit my final plateau and couldn't continue on that slow, steady decline.  I still think this method might have worked eventually, but after 8 years even my patience had run thin.

But there were other things I did on the gradual slope that actually created new habits and new behaviours that really helped when I did finally quit.

Somewhere around 10 years ago, I decided that I would I would only smoke in my study, not in any of the other rooms in the house.  About 6 years ago, I decided I wouldn't smoke in the house any more at all.  A variety of other factors (non-smoking friends, city bylaws, etc.) meant that smoking had become a completely outdoor activity.  And along with it becoming an outdoor activity, it became a solitary one.  99% of time, I smoked alone.  There was nothing social left about smoking for me.  I had to stop what I was doing, bundle up if it was winter, go outside, and smoke.  This also means that I didn't do anything else while I smoked.  I didn't smoke and watch TV.  I didn't smoke and talk on the phone.  I didn't smoke and write.

I smoked.  Full stop.  It was an activity of its own, fully detached from anything else in my life.

I didn't imagine how helpful that 6-year habit would be until I quit.  My behavioural associations with smoking are significantly fewer than many people's.  Where I do have them, they are sequential not simultaneous.  I don't need to smoke with my morning coffee, so my morning coffee has not become a site of almost irresistible temptation.  I may want to smoke before my coffee, or after it, but the thing itself has not been poisoned for me.  I don't pine for cold rainy fall days on the back porch, shivering while had a quick smoke.  In fact, because smoking was such a detached and solitary activity for me, the worst cravings arise when I really want to be alone, when I want to escape from the demands of the world and just be left to myself. I'm figuring out how to manage that one, but I think it's easier than managing coffee, or friendship, as triggers.

I didn't realize at the time how smart it was to slowly isolate smoking from the rest of my life, or how habituated I would become to that.  Sure, it took 8 years.  That's okay.  I'm a very patient woman.

Sometimes you get lucky

It turns out that I did a lot of things right when I quit smoking.  I wish I could take credit for all of them, but alas, most of them happened by dumb luck. A few were the happy byproducts of things that I did plan, so I try to take a bit of credit for those, but in reality, I got very, very lucky.

I decided to try quitting a few months before I actually did it.  A series of events were lining up that presented the perfect opportunity.  1) I was going on vacation in the UK, so the flight home meant I'd be stuck smoke free for about 11 hours no matter what.  2) My arrival time at home was about 6 pm (2 am London time) so I'd struggle to stay up for an hour or two and then sleep for another 8-10 hours.  I could actually make it through the first 24 hours on only 2 hours of willpower!  3) My partner was also going to Australia for two weeks, direct from London, so I was at significantly reduced risk of ruining my relationship and my life if withdrawal turned me into a monster. 

The stars were aligning nicely.  I would give it a whirl and if it didn't work out, no one but me needed to be disappointed.

So, I did it.  I had my last smoke in the afternoon sun outside of Heathrow, walked through security, and didn't really look back.  Some 11 hours later I arrived in Edmonton and piled in to the back of my in-laws' car.  "Did you have time for a smoke?" my generous mother-in-law asked.  "I'm good, yeah, thanks."  I think I managed to stay awake until about 8 pm before falling asleep.  Everything was going according to plan.

While I had planned on the benefits of that first 24-hour window, what I hadn't anticipated was what the next few days would hold.  Jet lag.  If you can plan to quit smoking while you're suffering from jet lag, I highly recommend it.  Seriously, you can't concentrate, you're slow, you're irritable, you're clumsy, your sleep cycle is messed up.  Is it the withdrawal or the jet lag? Who knows?  I'm still not sure which was which, but here's what I learned: I couldn't blame every rotten feeling in my body and my brain on quitting; I had an equally plausible counter-explanation.  I had deniability.  I had a scapegoat.

I'm sure many other things can be substituted for jet lag: switching to midnight shifts, having a baby wake you relentlessly all night long -- basically anything that is going to leave you slightly confused and profoundly alienated from your own body.

Sure it's important to plan.  It's important to have something tangible to hold onto, to put into play, to fall back on.  But it's also important to remember that luck can come from the most unlikely places, that good fortune is looking for you.  Smile at it when it arrives.  Jet lag won't last forever after all.

Whatever gets you through the Day

It's all just people talkin'
Does it really matter what they say?
Whatever gets you through the day
That's your way

Ah, Lighthouse Family.  You're forgiven if you can't hum along with that little chestnut.

But the truth is in there: whatever gets you through the day.

I have a lot of different strategies that help me keep from smoking.  Almost all of them I discovered by accident and not because some website told me about them.  I know, irony. Everyone loves it, but no one wants to pay for it.  It's okay, I can take it.  I'm going to offer one piece of advice anyway. Then I'm going to tell you a story about one of my coping strategies.  The advice is simple: pay attention to what you do, notice what works (as silly, embarrassing or lame as it might be), and figure out why it works.  Keeping the why close at hand is the key to making the same thing work again and again.

Now here's the story of one of my tricks, and the why that I keep close by.

Look to the right and you'll see a small label called "Vital Statistics."  Underneath is the tally of cigarettes I haven't smoked since I quit.  It's provided free by a little website called quitmeter and it's been my most important non-human support for the last 7 weeks.  It's a very simple concept.  You go to the website www.quitmeter.com and punch in some basic information: when you quit, how much you used to smoke, and how much a pack of cigarettes costs.  It then calculates how long since you quit, how much money you've saved, and how many cigarettes you've not smoked.

Whenever I tell people about my little gadget, they immediately say "of course, the money you'll save!!"  But that's not it for me.  I really don't care how much money I've saved.  What I care about is that ever running tally of cigarettes not smoked.  That number keeps me coming back again and again.  At first I clicked through so frequently that I witnessed almost every single increment:  6, 7, 8. YES! 8! Then I began to notice batches of 10:  56, 67, 75, 100.  YES! 100! In those first single increment days, I could picture their butts in an ashtray, a full ashtray, and i could see the actual volume of ash they created.  Then my mental ashtray became so full it was overflowing, piles of butts spilling out, searching for space to accommodate the next one.  Then it became one of those giant coffee cans, half full, then full, overflowing with what I had not smoked.

Something in that vision truly worked for me.  Something about that ever increasing number was messing with my psyche and I decided that I wanted to figure out what it was.   Here is what I figured out: what that number gave me was success  -- success no matter what.  If I had started smoking again, the rest of the world (and a big part of me) simply would have seen it as failure.  It didn't work this time, but maybe next time, right?  What that number gave me could never be taken away by failure.  It wouldn't matter if I started smoking again, that number would always be mine.  No matter what, I would always have 7, or 12, or 30 and there was no way to turn back time and make it as though I had smoked them. That's the trick of failure isn't it?  It turns back time.

Right now I measure my success in the 784 cigarettes I haven't smoked.  Even if I go outside and light up right now, that is success, not failure.  The rest is all just people talkin'.  But 784 gets me through the day.

You're Still Big Business

I can't bring myself to watch Mad Men yet. The aesthetics, the sheer beauty of wafting smoke, the clear confidence of a hand on a zippo. Don Draper reminds us of another era, an era that believed in the sheer sexiness of smoking.  It was pretty.  And it duped us.

We all remember the American lawsuits against big tobacco in the 1990s.  The companies were found guilty of all manner of fraud and liability, from deliberately hiding their knowledge of smoking's health risks to their lavish Madison Avenue campaigns that made us feel sexy, cool, rugged.  By the time I started smoking in the 1980s, the health risks were well known, but back in the 30s, 40s, 50s?  My aunt, who became an adult in the 1940s, speaks apologetically about smoking: "I tried it, but I just couldn't take to it."  I guess she didn't apply herself enough.  The sheer scope of Big Tobacco's fraud left us feeling righteously indignant.  They knew, but they wanted to keep turning a bloated profit.  They killed people to make money.

Naively, I never suspected that quitting smoking would plunge me into an entirely different profit-making machine.  As a critical humanist, and a scholar of cultural studies, it is, to say the least, embarrassing that I did not imagine that if companies would kill you to make a profit, surely there were many that would save you to make a profit too.  Ah capitalism and your clever ruses!

Here's what you need to know:  Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT) is big business.  Quit-smoking drugs are big business. (Just glance at the Ad Sense ads on my blog.  I'll wager they're all for some stop smoking aid.)  It seems so painfully obvious now, but I had honestly never thought about it before.  You're part of a billion dollar market and, as the saying goes, may the buyer beware.

Regardless of the efficacy (or lack thereof) of these products, I'm now interested in their economics: the way they build their market in order to satisfy it.  There is likely an entire book to be written about "Big Nicotine," but for now I'll simply whet your appetite with some not-so crackpot theories.  Drug companies are huge financial backers of stop-smoking campaigns.  Drug companies are behind the financing of massive numbers of studies that expose the health risks of smoking.  NRTs (as opposed to stop-smoking drugs) are still just as addictive as cigarettes.  There is a world of conspiracy theories to be found in those few facts.  But more importantly for me, there is a serious critical undertaking: how much and to what extent to I believe and trust in the information I have access to, given the economic context of its production? How much of what I learn arises from altruism, how much from cynical profiteering?

Here is just one example I've found of the ways that the discourse of quitting is being shaped directly by the companies behind the drugs and NRTs: try to search for information about what will happen to your body when you quit.  No matter how you configure your search, or how many sites you click through on, the majority of the information you find will be strikingly similar.  It will divide time into these increments: 20 minutes, 8 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours, 2-12 weeks, 3-9 months, 5 years, 10 years.  For the record, the (almost always uncited) information you find is copyright Johnson and Johnson, makers of Nicorette.  


Smoking was once cool and sexy.  Now, quitting is healthy and outdoorsy.  We've moved from one target market to another.

If I were being wholly honest though, I'd still rather be Don Draper than that crunchy-granola boy in the Khashi commercials.

Addictions

Addiction is complicated.  It works in all sorts of complicated ways that are at once bio-medical, social, and cultural.  And yet, the stories of nicotine addiction that I've encountered as I quit are all strangely similar, strangely simple.  We live in a world with a common-sensical understanding of addiction, a 12-step version of recovery that can be cut and pasted into any new circumstance, and big pharmaceutical companies who are happy to coach you through, well, whatever you might need to be coached through right now.  The scary part is that none of those stories is very novel, or very different from the rest.

I want to tell you a secret.  Quitting wasn't that hard.  There, I've said it.  

Here is the most common story you'll hear about nicotine addiction:  it is among the most powerful addictions there is, as powerful as cocaine or heroin.

Being a good cultural subject, I believed this story wholeheartedly.  I had never tried to quit, so I had no idea what it actually felt like.  But I knew it was almost impossible.  I knew it was "the hardest thing I've ever done."  

So I imagined the sort of fight I would need to put up against cocaine or heroin addiction.  I pictured myself in a Trainspotting-like daze, shaking and sweating, out in my backyard in the middle of the night, flashlight in hand.  I would crawl on my hands and knees, through the muck, desperately searching for an old butt that had escaped the outdoor ashtray.  I would brush it off when I found it, raise it to my lips, feeling the dirt in my mouth, and light it, cursing its dampness.  And then, once it caught, I would have one perfect drag, deep into my lungs, and my body would sink back, satisfied, and there would be some kind of dream sequence.  And just like that, I would fail.

I thought of a close friend, who once told me that she knew it was time to stop using cocaine when she was ready to snort the last few bits from a shag carpet after dropping some.  The backyard butt was my shag carpet.

The truth is that it was never like that.  The people who say it is as bad as cocaine have never been addicted to cocaine, have never loved someone addicted to cocaine, and have probably never even tried cocaine.  

So what was it like then?  The craving bore a much closer resemblance to the urge to keep eating an entire bag of cookies even though you know they'll make you sick.   I know.  Not Trainspotting-worthy.  Not even a little bit.

It seems to me that if the point to all of the stop smoking rhetoric is to encourage people to actually quit smoking, then you'd want people to feel like they actually stand a chance.  You'd want people to feel confident, self-assured, even, gasp, competent.  Sadly, there are far too many vested interests at stake to let that happen.  There is mileage and profit to be had in making this impossible.   

Was it hard?  Sure.

But if you can say it's the hardest thing you've ever done, then you've not done much my friend.

The Truth About Quitting

I quit smoking 7 weeks ago today.

7 weeks, 8 hours, 19 minutes and 37 seconds actually. 38. 39. 40.  (I have a little website that keeps track for me.) I've learned a lot over those 7 weeks -- a lot about myself, a lot about the people around me, a lot about quitting, and a lot about the kinds of stories that we are, and are not, allowed to tell about quitting.  I believe in stories.  I believe that telling stories is the way that we make sense of our place in the world, and the way that we understand the things that we feel, see, touch, need, and love.  I make sense of the world through words, both my own and those of others. 

So it makes perfect sense that I sought out words as I quit.  I wanted to know everything.  How would it feel?  What would happen in my body?  What did other people think and feel when they did this?  Day-by-day, minute-by-minute, I wanted the story of what was happening to me.  I wanted to know.  Everything.

The disappointment was almost immediate. I couldn't find anyone who actually told the truth.  Maybe they forgot because they were looking back too far in time; maybe they knew that the truth wouldn't inspire people to try to quit; maybe they just needed their story to fit with the stories they encountered all around them.  For whatever reason, the stories that surrounded me, that continue to surround me,  simply do not resemble my reality.  Thus, this blog.

Collected here my stories of quitting.  They tell the truth about what it's been like for me, regardless of what former smokers, the nicotine industry, or even my mother might think.  They tell the kind of truth I was looking for 7 weeks ago.

Well, 7 weeks, 8 hours, 32 minutes, and 11 seconds now.