I smoked cigarettes for twelve years: eight social and intermittent, three heavy and committed, and one particularly pretentious year during which I insisted on rolling my own. This November, I quit. It says something about me, or maybe about smoking, that I expect this statement to be met with celebration – flowers, candy, maybe some kind of parade. The actual reaction (”Great! Now, as I was saying…”) is always disappointing. No one knows how hard it is until they do it; until I did it, I had no idea how hard it was going to be. Here, for the future former smokers of the world, is how it went.

No More Cigarettes: Survival Tactics

The physical aspect of quitting was simple: I purchased a box of nicotine patches and planted myself in front of the TV with my knitting projects. (This Christmas will be forever known as The Year Everyone Got a Hat.) It takes the body only seventy-two hours to break a nicotine habit; I planned to wait mine out in comfort. “Comfort,” it turns out, was the wrong word: I was twitchy, headachy, and experienced an all-over physical discomfort that was just short of pain. Yet I did not smoke.

Then the trouble started.

Love In The Time of Withdrawal

It happened gradually: on Tuesday, I snapped at a waiter. On Wednesday, a friend wrote me an angry e-mail, and I replied with an angrier one. By Thursday, I’d picked fights with my boyfriend (”People don’t read literature in translation? How can you say that? God, it’s like Gabriel Garcia Marquez doesn’t even matter to you!”) and my boss. Then, on Friday, on my way to a party in Brooklyn, I turned the wrong corner and realized I was lost. I started crying. I didn’t stop until Sunday afternoon.

I tell you this not to unburden myself but to make a point. People tell you that cigarettes are addictive, but don’t tell you that, like most addictive things, people use them to self-medicate. For years, I dealt with unwanted feelings by smoking until they disappeared. When I had an argument with someone, I ended it by excusing myself to have a cigarette. If I thought I was about to cry, I smoked. As a person with no small level of social anxiety, I can tell you that having an addiction that allowed me to step outside of parties and stand by myself for upwards of ten minutes per hour was quite useful. It seemed there was nothing cigarettes couldn’t solve: “this is great, actually, because now I can smoke in my apartment,” I remember saying after a breakup, and the defiant half-sarcasm of that statement masked something I may never understand.

When I quit smoking, I lost my ability to opt out of emotions. The emotion I felt most clearly, when I realized this, was terror.

Losing a Habit, Gaining A Life

I missed cigarettes – still miss them, sometimes – more than I’ve missed almost anything in my life. I missed them so much it seems they must miss me: I would not be surprised to look out my window at any given moment and see a carton of Marlboro Lights on my front lawn hoisting a boom box like Lloyd Dobler. That much is a given; everyone knows quitting makes you cranky, though they may not know how cranky. The question is how to deal.

There are so many things you gain by quitting: better skin, more energy, extra cash, and the incomparable pleasure of not hacking up gobs of phlegm each morning or, you know, dying. Make it a point to enjoy them. Buy yourself something you couldn’t afford, were you still smoking, and calculate its cost in packs rather than dollars ($70 is the cost of both an iPod Shuffle and seven packs of cigarettes; unlike the cigarettes, the iPod will last longer than a week).

Find new tactics to deal with your anxiety and/or sadness and/or secret desire to hit people with a tire iron: at work, I step outside “for coffee” about as many times as I used to step out to smoke, and if I don’t come back with coffee, no one cares. Do yoga, drink green tea, eat organic, and feel free to be smug; you no longer have a smelly, cancerous habit undermining your hippie inclinations. Redecorate your apartment. Learn to cook. Be creative here: this is your life, and now you have more of it.

I smoked to avoid being sad. Now, I actually try to be happy. No one knows how hard this is until they do it; you’ll know how hard it is – and how rewarding it can be – when you have. When that happens, no one can be as happy for you as you will be for yourself. That, in and of itself, is cause for celebration.

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