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.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Thursday, September 9, 2010
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
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.
Monday, September 6, 2010
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.
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.
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