The day I turned 16, I picked up two things — my driver’s license and a $1.98 pack of Kool 100 Milds from a gas station I knew would sell to me.
It was 1995, and I still remember the freedom and rebellion alive in my heart while my hair blew in the wind. From the window of her mom’s LeBaron convertible, my friend and I flicked our cigarettes and seemingly our adolescent troubles with them.
After a decade with my pack-a-day vice, I worried I let smoking become a costume, like a suit of melancholic glamour that gave me an emotional shorthand for feeling tragic. I slipped into character when I needed to feel sometimes powerful, but more often undone.
By the time I hit my 20s, I also recognized that some of my most meaningful conversations were shared over an ashtray. My smoking habit started as a private rebellion but was always intrinsically social. Sharing the embodied experience of combusting a cigarette felt special, a way to bond with someone I loved.
I found many reasons to quit
The world was moving on, though, and tobacco control media campaigns successfully shifted public perception in the early 2000s. Product placement was then prohibited on TV and in the movies, and subsequent smoking bans meant I could no longer belly up inside a bar and light a smoke. In 2007, the Motion Picture Association of America began considering cigarettes as a reason for a stricter rating.
As the world was giving me myriad reasons to quit, I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at 27, which led to panic and a drastic reevaluation of my lifestyle. I flushed the remaining seven cigarettes in my pack and quit instantly.
I always came back to the pack
But for years, whenever I saw a stranger smoking beside bars or bus stops, I imagined French kissing them just to get a taste of what I’d been missing.
Over two decades, I relapsed off and on, allowing myself sporadic, shameful cigarettes. I lurked in plumes of stolen rebellion in my Chicago back alley, with my foot kicked back on the wall of a dingy late-night bar, in the corner of a Las Vegas casino, with that one coworker I knew would join me in secret.
On an annual girls’ trip to Saugatuck, Michigan, I relished in lighting up with one of my college friends — we were on the balcony of a rental house, but it may as well have been our dorm room. The familiar feelings rushed back, and I once again both loved and loathed myself for holding nostalgia and consequence in the same breath.
The desire to quit persisted
Recently, at age 46, I realized I’ve quit over 20 times in the past 20 years.
I can’t escape the multiple ways it’s bad for my physical and mental health. I am torturing myself with carcinogens, creating more problems in an already immunocompromised body. I berate myself, wishing I had more self-control.
I journaled about what it would take for me to truly quit for good. But rather than a list of consequences, what came out was a list of remembrances. I reminisced about my high school boyfriend, Mark, with the greasy hair, with whom I used to alternate makeout sessions and cigarettes. Or the time my uncle caught me smoking outside on Christmas Day when I was 17 — and still has never told my parents. Each entry ended where I started: I just really love an occasional cigarette.
As I entered a new year, I did something I hadn’t done in 20 years: I vowed to allow myself to smoke, but with limits. I will have no more than one a month, hopefully less, and if I do, it has to be from a place of self-possession. I will not crouch behind the dumpsters in my alley or steal away in the shadows or lie to my partner about it. I will enjoy the tactile ritual proudly.
And if it’s no longer illicit, can I quit for good?
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