(Content warning: This post describes the act of smoking several times, sometimes positively. If this might trigger or affect you emotionally, please prioritise yourself and feel free to skip this essay.)
30th September this year marked seven years since I quit smoking. When I completed 100 days of not smoking, I thought I’d learnt enough from the experience to write about it on my old blog, so I figure seven years marks a milestone to be celebrated.
I started smoking in my teenage, with my friends. We’d share one cigarette between the three of us, and even that was often too much for us. Like a lot of smokers, we started with Indonesian clove cigarettes, because they didn’t taste quite as nasty as the others. My friends continued smoking maybe one cigarette a week, but I got addicted. My dad had been a chain smoker since before I was born, and I should’ve been careful, but I had the hubris of the young, and anyway, smoking was cool.
Throughout the next decade, I would swing between a minimum of 5 cigarettes a day to my highest average of maybe 40 while I was in Calcutta, more if I was drinking. (That city loves its smokers – you’ll have trouble finding a pharmacy open at a reasonable hour, but a cigarette shop will open at 5 a.m. and stick around long past midnight.)
I tried quitting a few times before it stuck.
The first time, I decided I’d only smoke while I was drinking. That lasted maybe a week. Then I rationed myself to one cigarette a day – but it was real easy to convince myself that a second cigarette was okay just for today, and then you’re off.
Once, my boss disallowed me from smoking on office premises (for my own good – she was a friend), and figured that since I lived with my parents, I wouldn’t smoke. It lasted a day, after which I made a ritual of smoking a cigarette right before going into work and right after I left office (with tea), and I’d take a “walk” after dinner to get a third one in just under the wire.
In my worst smoking phase, I once tried to quit with nicotine gum, which worked well until I tried to get off the gum and ended up back on cigarettes.
The longest I stayed quit was just before a bad breakup, for about a month – after the breakup, I took a puff off a friend’s cigarette because I was in a terrible mood, and ended up back where I’d been in a matter of days.
I found it easiest to quit when I was rolling my own cigarettes. I believed then, and still do, that high-quality rolling tobacco has fewer addictive chemicals than cigarettes, and it’s easier to cut down your smoking and to quit. Whenever I switched from branded cigarettes to tobacco, for the first few days I’d want my next cigarette while I was smoking one, which makes me think I was getting less nicotine with each smoke.
I’d usually switch to rolling tobacco when I felt I was smoking too much (I was also a broke aspiring writer at the time, so money was a factor), and I’d come down to 7-8 cigarettes a day from my average of 30-40.
That would make me feel like I could quit, and I’d give it another go.
All this time, my friends were puzzled at my inability to just … not smoke, because they were happily smoking a couple of cigarettes a week, and didn’t get the big deal. (You should excuse them – we were all in our twenties at the time, so our thoughts about mental health and addiction weren’t very complex.)
And here’s the thing – apart from the fact that it was bad for me, made my chest feel like there was a weight on it all the time, and made catching a cold much worse, and affected my stamina, and gave me a hacking cough and made my clothes stink and burned holes in my bedsheets – I fucking loved smoking.
I still do. I love the idea of it, and I remember how it calmed down my attention issues and centred me. Even now, a glass of beer feels a little unfinished without a cigarette to go with it, and it took me years to enjoy a coffee without a smoke (turned out I had to start drinking better coffee). There’s nothing like standing out in the fresh air with a friend and lighting up together.
I love smoking. I just don’t smoke.
When you try to quit an addiction, you start seeing how much it has to do with structure. Addiction structures your day, it gives you a routine, thereby giving you stability and safety.
David Milch talks about this in Life’s Work, Nick Cave mentions it multiple times in Faith, Hope and Carnage – for both of them, heroin was a centring substance, because it gave their days structure. When you’re addicted, your days are planned around the substance, and your access to the substance. For Cave, shooting up and then going to church never felt like a contradiction, because those were his rituals. And for ages it’s fine, because you think you’re in control, until you wake up and realise that the substance controls you.
I think that’s the case for most addictions. I’ve had many alcoholic friends, and I’ve watched someone plan their day around their first drink at 5 p.m. – like that’s when their day truly begins. I know that my next addiction after smoking – work – happened when the world was on fire and work helped me structure my days when nothing else would.
The first cigarette in the morning always made me feel calm. Still in bed, I’d reach out for the pack – the way everyone reaches for their phone now – and I’d light up and contemplate the day. The next one would be with my first coffee, and another when I sat down to work. Every time I’d write a particularly tricky bit, or finish lettering a good page, I’d treat myself to another.
I don’t know if I could’ve gone through the first few years of being self-employed as well as I did if I weren’t smoking – it helped me self-discipline and figure out a daily routine. (I just realised that I quit smoking exactly a year after I quit my job and went freelance. Hmm.)
In a self-aware moment, I limited my smoking to the “essential” cigarettes – the ones my day was structured around – and I realised I’d still be smoking at least 8 cigarettes a day.
The downside of structure is that you start to plan your life around the substance. So every restaurant I went to had to have a smoking section, my friends would complain about having to sit outdoors in the cold just because I needed a smoke. I only took cabs that let me smoke in the back. On long train journeys, I’d sneak into the passage, sit next to the open door and smoke – sometimes I’d run into another desperate smoker there. Once I asked a friend to meet me at the airport with cigarettes and a lighter because my flight was going to land too late in the night to go looking for a cigarette shop.
So here’s why I quit.
It’s not a secret – everyone who knows me personally has heard this story.
My dad was an alcoholic and a chain-smoker, and he always took his health for granted. He remained surprisingly fit till his early 60s, when everything broke down at once. He had two strokes in quick succession, and ended up partially paralysed on one side.
From there, his health has deteriorated over the last eight years, and now he can’t move without help, is barely able to speak, needs to wear a diaper 24/7, has severe dementia, and is about 40% brain-dead.
It didn’t have to be like that. After the first stroke, we took him to specialists, who told us that constant smoking had damaged nerves that connected to his brain, which had caused his stroke, and which might cause further damage to his brain if not attended to immediately.
How to do that? He needed to quit drinking and smoking immediately and completely.
We took him to a rehab centre two hours from Pune, where he stayed for three weeks. They told us later that he tried to bribe an attendant to get him cigarettes. But he came back clean. A few months later, he had his second stroke, and sheepishly admitted that he’d been smoking outside the house.
We took him to rehab again, and two weeks after he was back home, I could smell cigarettes on his breath.
He did quit, finally. When his movements deteriorated to where he wasn’t able to leave the house on his own.
When did I quit? The first time we dropped him to rehab, in the two-hour-long cab ride back home, I stared out of the window and thought, Do I want to be in my 60s and my loved ones have to drag me somewhere so I can quit smoking?
I’ve never wanted to have kids, so this would fall to my niece or someone else who cared about me. Would I want to do that to them? Was my lack of control such that I’d rather destroy my life than stop doing something that was self-evidently bad for me?
The answer was clear. I would finish my current packet of rolling tobacco – a lovely Drum Bright Blue – and then never smoke again.
Having had several failed attempts, I knew this had to be cold turkey – no gum, no patches, no vapes – and it had to zero smoking of anything – no hookah, no weed, and again, no vaping. It had to be the Golden Rule:
Not another puff. No matter what.
My packet of Drum Bright Blue got over on 30th September, which I marked in my quit-smoking app of choice, and I haven’t smoked since.
Yeah. So.
That’s what I tell everyone, but that’s not the end of the story.
On 30th September, I finished my packet of tobacco, and I told myself, as I had hundreds of times before, I’ll quit after the next one.
So I went to my regular tobacco guy, and I asked him for a packet of Drum Bright Blue. He’d run out. He had the regular dark blue Drum – would I be okay with that?
No, I said.
I decided, like an addict does – even one who’s an atheist – to take that as a sign from the universe that I was meant to stop on that day.
That’s how I quit.
This makes it sound easy, but of course, it wasn’t. The first few weeks were bad. For a month, I didn’t meet any friend who smoked. For the next year and a half, it felt like I was five minutes from my next smoke.
Retroactively, the story sounds like a success, but as a recovering alcoholic will tell you, you don’t stop being an alcoholic just because you stopped drinking. It’s the same with smoking. I’m still a smoker at heart – just one who doesn’t smoke. This time seems like the time it stuck, but every time seemed like it till it wasn’t.
Even now, as I tell you how I stopped smoking, I’m still in a continual struggle to not smoke. Writing this, I probably got the strongest cravings I’ve had in a bit. But by this point, I’ve not smoked enough times that I know I can not smoke this time.
The most useful guideline when I stopped was from Smoke Free (Android/iOS): focus on not smoking for the next fifteen minutes. That’s all. If you look at the yawning void of the future all at once, it’s difficult to imagine not smoking for the rest of your life. But it’s easy to think of just the next fifteen minutes.
As you stay quit, that future gets bigger and bigger. You can start focusing on not smoking for the next few hours, then for the rest of the day, and the week, till you’re functionally a non-smoker.
Because the addiction was about structure, structure was part of the solution as well.
I replaced my ritual smokes (the one in the morning, the one with coffee, the one after a meal etc.) with other stuff. It’s been a while, so I can’t remember what they were – I think tea and chewing gum, knowing myself back then.
Over time, I developed an affinity to good coffee, and that took over, but even there, I was drinking far too much coffee for a while. Particularly when I made cold brew, it was easy to go through a litre of concentrate in a day, which, I can tell you, is decidedly not good for your body.
So I had to add an obstruction, the way rolling cigarettes added to smoking. I started grinding my own coffee beans, and that led to a pandemic-induced rabbit-hole into good coffee that I haven’t yet emerged out of. Thankfully, as you start drinking better coffee, you tend to drink less of it, so I’m on a stable two coffees per day, one at noon and one at six in the evening. It provides structure to my day.
I also got really into time management for a bit, which was, honestly, quite helpful as a self-employed freelancer.
Eventually, I ended up replacing my cigarette addiction with being a workaholic, but if you’ve been reading my newsletter over the last few years, you’ve already received a blow-by-blow account of that in your inbox.
Suffice to say, it’s not a story of heroic victory. It’s a story of putting one step after the other, and getting things wrong as much as you get them right.
You might not be smoking anymore, but you’re still living with yourself – and there was a reason you got addicted in the first place, right?
There were two times since I quit when I came really close to smoking again, and they were instructive.
The first was when I was commissioned to write a short story, around a year after I’d quit smoking. As I wrote this story, I realised how stressful my relationship to writing was, and how messed up. I alternately procrastinated and fretted over the story, delivered it a month late, and had no ability to tell whether I was doing a good job. For all the days I was working on it, I constantly wanted to smoke just so I could feel less fretful.
After I submitted the story, I did some soul-searching, and realised that I had never been clear on what I wanted to say through my writing, and therefore never knew if I was doing well or not. This changed my attitude towards writing fiction, and I’m in a far better and intentional place with it. But in the moment, all I could was quaff vast quantities of Red Bull and Diet Coke and white-knuckle it.
The second, unsurprisingly, was the pandemic. The first few weeks were great, but after that, till the lockdowns eased up, I felt like smoking all the time. In fact, here’s where it’s useful to admit that as an addict, you have no power. If I had any way of acquiring cigarettes without breaking lockdown, I would’ve started smoking again. It was a mercy that it wasn’t an option. I have no story of strength and willpower here, because that’s not what the story is about.
I don’t necessarily regret smoking when I smoked. There were a lot of things wrong with me and my life back then, and smoking was just one of them. I had no awareness of my attention issues, and believed it was completely my fault that I couldn’t finish things I’d started, and why my life was going nowhere.
Smoking was a crutch. Whether it was the chemical action, or the ritual, or just a matter of helping me stop fidgeting – smoking helped me make things happen.
When I quit, part of me was worried about “losing it”. You’ve heard it before – any creative person who does drugs or has unhealthy rituals is afraid to find out that the drug or the booze or the ritual was the magic, not them.
But quitting – that was magical.
Every time I had a craving, or felt like shit after I’d quit, I had to actually confront the emotion behind the craving rather than avoid it with a smoke. That was uncomfortable, but in the long term, it was always better.
It also made me tackle my attention issues and figure out better ways through them than just “go outside and have a smoke”.
This one might sound silly, and other people who quit smoking look at me strange when I say this, but quitting put me back in touch with my emotions. I didn’t realise this till I quit, but I had been numbing myself since my teenage, never able to access the heights or depths of my feelings – always staying at a low hum. Once I quit, I started crying at films – which was lovely – and crying from joy, which was even better. Feeling negative emotions to their fullest isn’t fun, but it’s an essential part of being human I’d been denying myself for my entire adulthood.
Finally, here’s why quitting was really magical.
Quitting smoking is, full-stop, the hardest thing I ever tried to do. And I did it.
Nothing else I’ve had to do since then was as hard.
So whenever I’ve been confronted with something that feels too difficult, or feels like too big a leap of faith, I have always, always been able to remind myself: I did the hardest thing I ever had to do.
If I could do that, this is nothing.
