on smoking (again)
I have just quit smoking, which is obviously not interesting at all. It’s about the twelfth time I’ve quit smoking in the past seven months. This is also not interesting. But look, it’s been a journey.
I smoked the cigarette I thought would be my last cigarette in February 2018, in the car park of Homerton Hospital. It was, and I feel this is important, a Marlboro Gold. I had been smoking Marlboro Golds for about a decade at that point, maybe more. I started smoking because I was a dumb teenager and I thought it looked cool and would make me skinny and Marlboros were what Kate Moss smoked, and I loved Kate Moss because she embodied in an almost saintly way much of what I wanted to be at that point (cool, skinny). At fifteen I would have canonised Kate Moss if I could. I hid smoking unsuccessfully from my parents by smoking out of my bedroom window and dropping fag ends in the gutter and hoping it would rain before it caught fire and burned the house down. I maintain a suspicion that I would be taller if I hadn’t started smoking so early. Indie sleaze has cost us so much. But I digress.
My theoretical last cigarette: I had, annoyingly, just been diagnosed with cancer. I had come out of a hospital appointment where an oncologist had laid out a months-long plan that was necessary to save my life. My boyfriend of a year – poor him, terrible timing – was with me and we were both understandably pretty dazed by this whole experience and we smoked one cigarette each and then I put them in the bin, the whole packet. On the way home we stopped at Hackney Central McDonalds and I got a large strawberry milkshake, McNuggets and chips, and afterwards I was like okay: health.
I instantly quit: smoking, alcohol, dairy, meat, fish, soft drinks, sugar and caffeine and embarked upon a totally new and alien life filled with whole foods, nutritionists, vitamins and meditation whilst simultaneously moonfaced with steroids and pumping my veins full of the kind of chemicals they used in the Vietnam War. My hair fell out. I cried all the time. I made a mental list of which of my ex-boyfriends messaged to say they felt sad for me, and vowed to haunt the ones who hadn’t. The only thing I could do with my evenings was get stoned by myself and watch Naked Attraction. It was a regime totally motivated by the kind of white hot fear that only comes, I think, with devastating medical news, and because of the intensity of that panic, it was a successful one in that I didn’t smoke again. Not once. Until I did, inevitably.
2022: a vibe shift came. Indie sleaze returned to ruin our lives again. Skinny jeans and Jeffrey Campbell Litas began emerging from the shadows and onto our Depops. After two years of lockdown wholesomeness everyone was done with sourdough and Zoom press conferences and they wanted to get fucked up again. Ban graphs forever. Down with wholesomeness. After the pandemic forced us to think about our health almost constantly, it made sense that nobody wanted to think about it ever again. Smoking returned, en masse. “With the pandemic and climate change, our aesthetic and behavior are certainly shaped by a sense of doom”, Allison P. Davis wrote in her seminal essay for The Cut. “There’s a nihilism to the way people dress and party; our heels get higher the closer we inch to death. It’s why people are smoking again.”
It’s why I was smoking again, at least. But in a guilty way – which is half of the joy of smoking in the first place, and probably 75% of the joy if you’re Catholic – because I had, I felt, spent even longer than two years allowing my aesthetic and behaviour to be shaped by a sense of vague impending doom. I had let my fear-driven health kick dictate every single thing I did and touched and ate and drank. I experienced genuine crippling anxiety if I used deodorant that contained aluminium. I pined over Diet Coke but refused to drink it because I was afraid of aspartame. I got better, but I still Googled and doom-scrolled endlessly and tortured medical professionals to tell me why I got sick in the first place and what would stop me getting sick again, and infuriatingly found there was no answer to either of these questions, which drove me half-insane. I wouldn’t let myself have more than two drinks at any time, which forced me into a boring and lonely life of social distancing long before COVID dictated it. If my physical health was great – hadn’t had a cold in about four years – my mental health was precarious. During the pandemic I was put on the shielding list, which compounded the sense of general unease and anxiety. I couldn’t set foot across the door for 10 weeks. Living this way is exhausting, because even if you reduce all risk, you can’t really ever reduce all risk. Junk food might kill you, but there will always be microplastics in the healthy stuff anyway. Everything is a carcinogen. Even one drink is enough to fuck you up, so, you might ask, what’s the point in not having ten? Like all of us, I missed debauchery. I missed drugs and parties and the idea that possibilities were endless, and that life was always and would always be good, and that I would never die and none of my friends would either. I was annoyed by how boring and cautious my twenties had become. Once the door was open to me and I was vaccinated, I never wanted to go inside again. I wanted to sit in a crowded pub garden and puff, endlessly, on cigarettes.
Like many bad habits it happened gradually and then all at once. I went through a period last summer of buying a pack of cigarettes while incredibly drunk, smoking one and then either throwing the rest away or giving them to perplexed but grateful passers-by. Then I realised this was a financially unviable way of proving I no longer had any willpower. I went through a period where I convinced myself because I’d switched from Marlboro Golds to Vogues, smoking was now fine. Vogues have a cult following and communicate a kind of chicness that I don’t have and want to have. When I tried to write something about the cult of Vogues earlier this year fellow fans got in touch with such enthusiasm it proved to me that this is perhaps the one industry in which brand loyalty still thrives. Angela Rayner smokes them, probably. “They are vastly superior to vaping”, one person told me. “Vogues are in fact such a key part of my personality that for my birthday last year my friends stuck them on my cake instead of birthday candles. It was a Colin the Caterpillar cake, obviously.”
I convinced myself that maybe Vogues were simply part of my personality too. And smoking gave me somewhere to be at parties when I didn’t know anyone – out the back, gesticulating – and something to do with my hands. When I didn’t smoke I ended up biting the skin on my fingertips or picking off all of my nail polish instead and then reapplying the nail polish which is kind of anti-social in an open plan office. When I feel bad about myself or my life or the fate of the planet I think, fuck it, cigarette? And when I feel good about myself or my life (never the fate of the planet) I think, fuck it, I deserve a cigarette. When I feel aggrieved by my medical history I think, why shouldn’t I smoke? Why can’t I be like everyone else? This isn’t fair! And so on and so forth. I think of the way when I speak to doctors about the medication I still have to take – for up to a decade – and how it makes me sick or sad or fatigued or aggressively unhorny they just shrug and offer to take me off it, because they’ve changed their plan for treating chronic illnesses now. They let the patient lead the way. Once the danger has passed and the dust has settled they focus not just on keeping you alive, but giving you quality of life. They won’t force you to take medication that reduces your quality of life – perhaps because when they did lots of people stopped doing it in secret anyway – even if they know it’s the most sensible option.
But all of this is just an attempt to assuage guilt and apply logic to something that’s illogical. I know aromatase inhibitors are not the same as nicotine. I know smoking is not just unhealthy but maybe… morally wrong? I know I shouldn’t smoke. I cost the health service a lot of money. I write about this, maybe too often. I know plenty of people who have recovered from terrifying illnesses and gone back to drugs and eating meat and I don’t do either of these, but that doesn't make me feel any better. I know human beings are fallible, but I worry people will see me smoking, or read this, and think I am ungrateful or suicidal (not sure which is worse). I know it doesn’t really matter that “at least I don’t vape”, because vaping is probably better for you anyway even though it looks so, so unchic. Sadly, unavoidably, historically: smoking is cool.
I know it doesn’t matter that my favourite writers smoke — and that in fact this is cringe. I know it doesn’t matter how aggrieved I feel over my own mortality, my history is simply my history. There’s nothing I can do about it except try to move on from it, because looking back at it is too overwhelming. I feel guilty every time I steal a cigarette from someone. I know smoking is bad for everyone but perhaps in particular for me. When I get backache from hunching over my keyboard or a cough from bad weather I convince myself it’s something else and panic and Google into the early hours of the morning. When I feel nihilistic or bored or drunk or socially awkward or depressed I give up on my good intentions and buy another pack, and then I frequently end up throwing them away, which is really burning through my not-so-disposable income. I know it doesn’t matter, really, that a pack lasts me weeks or that loneliness is actually worse for you than smoking, so perhaps I’m doing less damage to my health now than I was between the years of 2018 and the end of the last lockdown. I know it doesn’t matter that outside the smoking I eat healthy and take an alarming amount of vitamins. I know it doesn’t matter that “everyone smokes when they’re drunk”. I have to wash my hair more than I’d like to.
My last reserve of logic was that I started my self-destructive throwback habit again in June last year, and it crept up on me, and now I am quitting just under the line of one annus horribilis of bad decisions. I don’t want to think about what the lapse in good judgement and morality has done to my life expectancy, which I can helpfully see in real time thanks to a calculator developed by Cambridge University (thanks guys). I’m quitting now and committing that to writing. It’s unfortunate that I’m deciding to do this at the point the weather is about to turn to peak smoking weather (the platonic ideal of a cigarette: you are in a beer garden in early June. It’s afternoon. You have a cocktail and you’ve just heard some mid-tier gossip that you can enjoy because you’re not implicated in it at all.) Anyway, I’m done with it. I’m going back to my unchic-vegan-nothing-good-inside-them-anyway-why-are-they-so-expensive vapes (these ones).
The one thing worse than smoking is talking about quitting smoking, or writing about quitting smoking. If you see me with a Vogue in hand at any point over the coming summer no you didn’t.
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