smokin' in the boy's room

Unlike most people, I waited until I was about 22 before I ever took a sip of alcohol or inhaled from a cigarette.

It occurs to me that it has now been over a year since I quit smoking.

No congratulations are in order - I still consider myself an addict.

And maybe that is why I was straight-edge for so many years. Even before I had ever tried alcohol or cigarettes or any form of street drugs, I already knew that I felt ‘addictive’ towards things. I knew that if something was fun or felt good that I would want to do it all the time, in as many ways as I could possibly afford.

I make a distinction between the way that I am addicted to smoking and the way that most other people are addicted to smoking. For me, I was obsessive about it. Rather than waiting for any kind of feeling in my body to tell me that it was time to light up a fag, I would already have one lit. I would sit for hours smoking cigarette after cigarette. I would do any and all of my normal daily tasks with a smoke in my hand.

A special pleasure was smoking in the bathtub. I would lay there for a couple hours, soaking, soaping, smoking. No shit.

How I managed to quit, I am not sure. When I think about it now, despite the myriad of reasons why smoking is fucking terrible, I still think of pleasure and indulgence.

There is something so languorous and decadent about smoking. It made me feel relaxed, yet occupied. It made me feel like I was doing something special for myself, yet it made me feel sick and tired.

I guess I wanted to feel sick and tired. I wanted that to be okay. Feeling sick and tired felt inevitable.

My smoking was markedly worse for the first couple of years I had MS. I was sick and scared and in pain and isolated – and I always had a smoke in hand. It did not help that I was unable to work a regular job and was living in poverty. I worked 3 – 6 hours a week at an under-the-table catering company – making $8/hr – just to subsidize my addiction. At worst, I smoked almost 2 packs of those crazy long lady cigarettes on a daily basis. Driving to the 7-11 at 4am was a regular occurrence for me. During the years of extreme insomnia, I would underestimate how many cigarettes I would need to last me through the night, finding myself at random convenience stores at unreasonable hours.

One of my friends, a *long time* smoker, told me that even 15 years after she quit smoking, she *still* has cravings. Fuck.

Die hard.