My Final Quit

I smoked most of my life—over forty years. Because I believed I was able to control my use of tobacco, I was never particularly interested in quitting. I had cut down, from two packs to one, from one to half, from half a pack to sometimes as few as three cigarettes on a good day. In all that time, I even had quit smoking completely several times for as long as a year, and I picked it up again each time.

This quit was cold turkey, and it’s the final quit. Clean for five years now, I can finally say that smoking is a no longer an issue.

Why quit now? At first it was mainly because smoking had gotten to be inconvenient as society changed, actually wanting to breathe clean air instead of secondhand smoke. Then it became something I wanted to do, to see if it made any difference, because I had smoked most of my life. Then I read a gal’s comments in her public journal after she’d been off tobacco for six months. She talked about finally discovering who she really was. That got my attention.

To some, the cigarette

Is a portable therapist.

~Terri Guillemet

1

That First Toke

My first toke was in a canoe floating down the river behind the country club on a dare from the only friend I had when I hit ninth grade. A sickly kid with luck for serial childhood diseases, I missed great stretches of elementary school, thereby also missing those connections that forge friendships for life.

I remember one morning, after being out of school a while with a broken ankle from playing stoop tag—my ankle hit a rock when I fell to the ground—I was in the hallway scratching under my cast with a straightened coat hanger. My mom whisked me away to the clinic where we learned that I had chickenpox, resulting in more weeks out of school, which by now was becoming an experience of continuous sick days. One teacher actually made home visits in an effort to keep me on track with the other kids.

On top of that, my anchor, my best friend, my dad, died an early death, when I hit sixth grade, and kids tend to avoid other kids who cry a lot.

Daddy smoked unfiltered camels. I’ll never forget the day I visited him by myself in the hospital.

It was after the first heart attack. There’s an oxygen tank in the room, and he sends me to the magazine store mere blocks from the hospital to buy cigarettes. I was barely ten, but somehow, even in 1957, I knew that was a bad idea. Still, he was my dad. I loved him more than anyone, and he knew I’d do anything for him.

The flood of grief that hit me when he died after the next heart attack lasted twenty more years, providing an impenetrable barrier surrounding me.

Naturally, by the time I got to junior high all the friends were already taken. All but one, that is. She sat in front of me in the most boring class imaginable, and she adopted me as a sort of pet.

We had assigned seats, alphabetized, which took the pressure off sitting with your friends, which was especially good in my case because I didn’t have any. This gal was not the student eager to please that I had become, because I was so happy, finally, to be in school. She kept turning around, talking to me, joking about the dud who was our teacher, and the mischievous twinkle in her eye suggested happy times to come. I’d never met anyone like her, and I was thrilled by the attention she gave me.

We were both single-parent-family kids and our mothers worked, so we had lots of time to ourselves, especially in the summers. Our friendship was cemented by the many dares she offered, and my endless desire to please her so she’d still be my friend.

One hot, summer day when we were coasting down the river in a rented canoe, she dared me to smoke. Naturally, I said, Okay. When I coughed so hard I almost tipped our canoe, she laughed at me because I was a weenie who could only do one puff.

In high school, I learned that my Baptist boyfriend was having sex with that cute little cheerleader, and I discovered empowering defiance. One weekend night I was in the back seat of a car full of girls cruising for adventure. We stopped at the Dairy Queen, and when someone passed me a lit cigarette, he appeared out of the blue, jerked the back door open, and demanded that I Put that cigarette out!

I looked at him with all the menace I could muster and spit out my words. You have no authority over me, and I don’t care what you think! That moment felt so good that I must have formed a link then and there between personal power and smoking.

As an undergraduate in college, cigarettes rapidly became my best friend. They helped me study in my dorm room, gave me permission to take a break from studying, and provided an activity to keep my hands busy so I could mingle with boys despite a shyness so strong that I couldn’t walk to the library by myself. Fortunately, I was in a sorority—instant, fake friendship—and had artificial girlfriends in the dorm with whom I could walk to classes, to study hall, even to the library. Even at night.

In graduate school, smoking was so totally accepted that ashtrays were provided on the big conference tables in classrooms! Students and professors alike puffed through class, and no one ever complained.

As a junior high teacher, my room was located on the third floor next to the teacher’s lounge. I could slip in there easily and have a puff, even between classes!

Because I walked several miles to work each day, I never questioned any ill effects smoking might have on me. That belief—that if we were physically active we needn’t worry—was reinforced by all my smoking friends who ran or cycled or played sports despite the extensive information that was fairly widespread in the early seventies.

However, that belief began to crumble after a bizarre experience one summer on the last day of an intensive, nine-week graduate school program. We were having our last discussion and, strangely, my cigarette kept going out. I kept lighting new ones.

Finally, I saw what was putting them out: water streaming down my arm!

While everyone else was sharing what they’d learned and all their plans for changing the world when they got back to wherever they came from, I was having a bizarre psychotic break.

Tears streaming down my arm, putting my cigarettes out was the first clue.

I ran out of the class, down the hall, into the bathroom and stared into the mirror. I did not recognize the image that stared back.

Moments later, the superintendent who was serving as the professor’s teaching assistant came in and stood behind me.

Come with me. Let’s go see my friend who can explain what’s happening.

Somehow I found myself standing in the doorway of an office and a woman wearing skin-tight, white pants stuffed into boots resting on top of her desk swiveled her chair in my direction.

Oh good! You’re in crisis. We can get some work done.

The reason I was in crisis is not important to this story. What important is that at moment, in 1974, I began to realize that smoking was doing something to me besides trashing my lungs.

No matter. I stuffed that tiny awareness away from my conscious mind and kept on smoking.

How is that possible? you ask.

Piece of cake. Things were different then. I was too busy to dwell on silly things like little breakdowns and, like most other smokers, I was invincible.

Now’s a good time to ask yourself why you started smoking.

It’s Your Turn

Close your eyes and think back to that first drag on a cigarette.

Where were you?

Who were you with?

What was going on?

How did your body respond?

What did you decide about smoking?

It has always been my rule

never to smoke when asleep,

and never to refrain

when awake.

~Mark Twain

2

Why I Continued to Smoke

Cigarettes were rapidly becoming my best friend. They didn’t try to tell me what to do. They were constant and reliable. Best of all, they were there for me when people weren’t.

As a college professor, smoking offered me breaks away from the job, especially when new laws outlawed smoking inside public buildings. When writing grant proposals, performing community service in addition to my full work week at the school, doing extra-duty as advisor to cover teachers who weren’t doing their own advising, when all that stuff got to be too much my friend would say, Let’s step outside for a minute. Obviously, my friend cared about me.

Smoking was not only a brief escape from the tensions of the job, but also pretty much the only socialization I experienced for years as a workaholic. When I got to slip outside and yak for a few minutes with teachers or students (who also smoked), that camaraderie—a student or colleague stopping by for a smoke—was pretty much the only non-working people time I had.

On one occasion, puffing away outside with students, a younger gal, an adjunct teacher (neither had her doctorate degree nor been hired onto permanent staff) came marching along, fuming with righteous indignation.

You should be ashamed of yourself, smoking in front of students! Cigarettes kill!

I glanced at the fifty-year-old man-student standing next to me, easily twenty years older than she was, and laughed.

Your judgments will kill you way faster than this cigarette will kill me, I said. How could I take her seriously when I knew she was humping a colleague, someone else’s husband?

The only people who objected to my smoking seemed to be doing it from some high moral ground that was, in fact, shifting sand. Smoking had become way too important to me to be hampered by sanctimonious prigs.

It was easy for me to continue smoking when I suffered no ill consequences physically, and when I had a job that gave me freedom of movement. As a college professor, I didn’t have a department supervisor watch-dogging my every movement. (Well, actually I did, but that’s another story.) The freedom to move around campus like an independent contractor moves around a work site made it easy to grab a smoke.

Not only that, but there was still something alluring about smoking and its connection with the intellectual atmosphere. Professors had smoked in my graduate school classes, and all my other intellectual heroes smoked, including Albert Einstein.

Even when I pursued professional training in alternative health areas, I got no signal that smoking wasn’t a good idea. Many of those teachers smoked. In fact, as a massage therapist in training I tested strong for tobacco, which is to say, according to the kinesiology test we did in class my body responded that tobacco was good for me. If my body was okay with smoking, why stop?

None of my massage clients ever said anything about it. When I offered workshops, most of the participants were smokers, and sliding outside on break gave them an opportunity to ask that personal question they didn’t want to ask inside, in front of the group. In fact, our shared puffing possibly created the rapport necessary for them to open up even more.

As a therapist in a field in which heroes like Carl Jung smoked, I had no reason to quit, although, increasingly, new clients wanted me to hypnotize them to make them quit smoking. My textbook response—No one can make you quit; you won’t stop until you’re ready—fell on deaf ears.

The fact that most of my clients were cancer patients did not affect my puffing because they didn’t get their cancer from smoking; they were all absolutely non-smokers.

It’s not that I never wanted to quit. I certainly did. In every journal scanned during most of the forty plus years I smoked I found frequent entries saying something like, "Now’s