Demon Weed

Peer pressure got me started smoking cigarettes when I was thirteen years old. For the next twenty-seven years, I was never a heavy but always a habitual smoker.

In September 1997, for my 40th birthday present to myself, I decided to quit.

I wrote to my friends the Jewinskis to tell them what it was like.

I described my desperation when smoking was banned in the workplace:

“I battle with the demon that sometimes lives in my belly, sometimes in my head, sometimes in my hypothalamus and sometimes in all three. There it lurks and pokes and jabs and torments, makes me frustrated with longing, panicked with craving and desperate for that moment when I can flee, seclude myself, light up and drag deeply. When I'm back in the company of my colleagues, I'm still edgy and self-conscious. I reek of cigarette smoke and failure.”

And the comforts of addiction:

“A small voice used to reassure me, when I pulled a cigarette out of the pack and fired it up, that there were “no consequences.” This meant no smoking-related illness would arise from that single cigarette. Smoking that cigarette would not keep me from quitting some day. “No consequences” meant that I existed in a perpetual present as a smoker; there would be no reckoning.”

And past attempts at quitting:

“When I was nineteen, I’d been smoking for six years. I went to London, England, in September 1976. I stayed there a month and did not smoke. I returned home to Trenton in October and did not smoke. In November, I took a three-week job as a cook at a truck stop and was smoking regularly by the time the job was done.

“The second time I almost quit was a six-month-long project where I got myself down to one cigarette a day. From January to June 1995, I sharply reduced my consumption and waited, patiently, for the day to come when the ravening beast within me would be too starved to call for more nicotine.

“My error was leaving it up to my addiction to tell me when to stop.”

And explained the reason for my success:

“Now it’s October 27, 1997. It has been more than four weeks since I bought my first box of nicotine patches, and ten days since I gave up the patch. Since I made the decision to quit, I have smoked eight cigarettes, six within the first 48 hours, the last on October 18. None since then and never again because, lord help me, I never want to go through the agony of quitting again.” 

And I never did.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

My trimmed finger:
Healing nicely