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I quit smoking on New Year’s Day 2024.
Three days later, I buy a pack of cigarettes.
The addict who’s lived inside me since I was 17 knew I would. She’s had an hour in the car to justify lighting up.
“You just dropped your husband off at the hospital. They’re gonna cut open his neck, for God’s sake! He might have cancer! This is really stressful. You deserve to smoke. And you’re going to be alone so no one will know. Perfect!”
I stop at a convenience store and buy the damn cigarettes. Once home, I pull on my ratty fleece smoking jacket and head out the back door. I glance down the driveway to make sure no one’s dropping by, and casually walk to the back of the garage, my inner addict vibrating in anticipation.
In the distance, I hear a tiny voice. I’m sure it’s saying, “Wait! Wait! Don’t do it!” But I can’t tell, because my addict is roaring in my ears.
I open the pack of cigarettes, pull out the protective paper, and voila! There they are! Twenty perfect cylinders of stress relief. Place cig between lips, strike match, cup hands, flame to tip, suck to get the paper and tobacco burning. Here I am again, back with the trash bins, propane tank, and random crap we stash behind the garage so no one sees it.
I wake the next morning with ashtray mouth, but I have 15 cigarettes left. At $13 a pack, I’m smoking them. My addict jumps in, “It’s OK, you’ll quit tonight. No one will ever know.”
Except now I’ve broken the New Year’s Day barrier, the hard stop date. I was so sure I would make it this time. But I was sure on my birthday in November, too. Before that, it was my mother and sister’s memorial. I’d quit for weeks, but then my addict would talk me into a little smoking holiday. “Oh, come on, just for the weekend,” or, “Just while you’re out of town by yourself.”
This off-and-on-again smoking had been going on since 2017, when my addict, asleep for 11 years, woke up. That year, my sister, who still smoked, moved to town, and our mother began the slow slide into Alzheimer’s hell. I thought I could have a cigarette now and then and not really start up again. Yeah, right. You know what’s even worse? My sister got cancer, and I kept smoking.
A friend asked me, “You have the knowledge and motivation to quit. What’s the missing piece?”
God, how I wish I knew. I’m definitely motivated, and I know all the grisly, disabling, and deadly things smoking will do to me.
I know, too, why I smoke. Put simply, nicotine releases endorphins that relieve stress and give me that numbing effect. It also releases dopamine, which gives pleasure and a sense of reward, making me want to do it again. Without any conscious effort from me, my brain created a neural pathway from trigger (strong or painful feelings, smell of smoke, being in a bar, etc.) to behavior (smoke) to reward (relief and pleasure). I have travelled this particular neural pathway so many times that there is a nonstop high-speed highway in my brain that automatically lights up when I’m triggered and leads me directly to a cigarette.
Photo Courtesy Of Kim Kelley
I also know my personal triggers: stress, frustration, anger, self-pity, sadness, feeling powerless. These feelings were my constant companions during the last few years of caring for my mother and my sister. But they’re only occasional visitors now. That’s the thing with addiction — after a while, you don’t even need a trigger. Because of the reward circuitry in my brain, I have created a monster in my head who is hungry all the time. “I NEED A CIGARETTE!” she screams. Try as I might to fight her off, I eventually give in.
I fool myself that this intermittent smoking I’ve done over the last six years isn’t harming me. My addict says, “Yeah, don’t worry, you still exercise regularly. And you don’t look like a smoker. Just chill out.”
She is lying. I can see on my face the roughly 182,500 (OMG) cigarettes I‘ve smoked over my lifetime. The giveaway vertical lines above my upper lip from pooching and sucking an average of 8 times per cigarette. That’s, let’s see…1,460,000 times.
And what the hell just happened? Why am I already behind the garage lighting up again? Well, duh. Quitting right before your husband’s going into the hospital for surgery, and when you’re going to be home alone, is a surefire set up for failure.
But I have failed over and over even in the best of circumstances. Just what am I missing?
I went online and read that only 5% of people manage to quit smoking without help, like nicotine replacement therapy (the patch, gum, lozenges), a quit program, or the support of family and friends. Because I had quit in 2006 without help, I thought I could do it again.
I finally admitted to myself I was powerless over nicotine and needed help. First thing the next morning, I stuffed my smoky hair under a hat, drove to town and bought patches. $50 for a box. I’d need three boxes to wear a patch a day for the recommended six weeks. That’s $150 to quit smoking. Considering I’d already spent over… ummmm… errrrrr… $45,000 on cigarettes in my lifetime, I thought I could shell out $150. Besides, if I instead smoked half a pack a day during those six weeks, I’d spend $273. No brainer.
I pressed that patch on my upper arm and felt triumphant, sure that adding this new tool was going to do the trick. It would silence my addict while I did the work of replacing the act of smoking with new behaviors. Through gradual withdrawal and strengthening other neural pathways to behaviors that also released endorphins and dopamine, that highway to cigarettes would begin to fade and these other pathways would light up in my brain. I kept a list of alternative endorphin/dopamine hits close at hand: run, walk, meditate, listen to music, eat chocolate, have sex, drink wine (only after 5 p.m., of course).
Two days later I drove to Seattle to be with Mark for his thyroid surgery, patch on and proud. They removed half of his thyroid and a tumor the size of a small fist. A biopsy the year before showed no cancer, so we weren’t too worried. Mark had to stay in the hospital a few more days but was feeling fine, so he sent me home. Armed with my patch, I bypassed all my secret convenience stores and vegged out watching a movie.
The next morning, I felt so low and heavy I had to force myself out of bed for coffee. The caffeine didn’t help. I stuck on a new patch and crawled back under the covers. I cried about nothing. After an hour of tears and near-catatonia, I prodded myself to take a walk to my favorite place, hoping it would pry me out of my funk.
When I got home, I collapsed back into bed. Why was I feeling this way? Was I scared about Mark? Was I suddenly grieving my mother and sister again?
“Hmmm,” my addict murmured. “Maybe it’s the patch. It’s the only thing that’s new. Maybe it’s making you depressssssssed,” she whispered in my ear, like Gollum from the Lord of the Rings. “Maybe if you take it off, you’ll feel better. Get some cigarettesessssss. Just one more night. Cigarettesesssssss will get you through thisssssssss. Yessssss, take the bad patchesssss off!”
So I did. For the next few days, I smoked with abandon in my lair behind the garage. I told myself I’d quit the day after Mark came home from the hospital.
This time I would add the one tool I hadn’t tried so far: I’d ask friends and family for support. I really didn’t want to do this, because it would mean coming out of the proverbial closet and revealing my shame. The few friends who knew I smoked thought I’d quit. But I knew from experience that sharing something I’m ashamed of released its power. Kept in the closet — or behind the garage, in my case — I could continue to smoke, because no one knew. It wasn’t real, even to me.
It took the better part of a day to craft the email to a small group of trusted friends (punctuated with cigarettes behind the garage, of course). At 20 degrees, it was crappy smoking weather, but at least it wasn’t raining. It felt like the stars were aligning for me to quit, and I was doing everything I knew to increase my chances of success. So many other times I thought quitting would happen by itself, like magic; that I’d be able to fend off my addict unarmed as she charged at me.
I sent the email, closing with, “God, this is embarrassing. I don’t want to push send but I’m going to. I’m pretty good at embarrassing myself and have lived through it many a time! With humility, thanks, and hope, Kim.”
They all sent back supportive messages, which gave me little hits of dopamine. For a minute I thought, “Oh, this is nice! Who else can I send it to?”
In addition to understanding how addiction worked in my brain, using the nicotine patch and support apps, blowing the lid off my secret, and asking friends and family for support, I dug deep to understand more about why I smoked. Was there something else I got from hiding behind the garage and smoking? It certainly wasn’t camaraderie, since I did it alone, or because everyone else was doing it, because they aren’t (except, perhaps, in their own versions of the closet).
It finally dawned on me: Smoking behind the garage was an escape to a place where I didn’t have to respond to anyone’s needs. When I came home from Mom, my sister, or one hospital or another, my addict led a defeated, depleted me to this lair where she would both numb and boost me up with nicotine. The point was to be alone, behind a shield to protect me from all the sadness, grief, and powerlessness against cancer, dementia, and the pain, fear, and trauma of the three people I loved most.
I was 15 days smoke-free when we learned that Mark’s tumor contained two types of cancer. Instead of listening to my addict screaming, “Cancer! OMG. This is really bad. You deserve to smoke. Let’s go behind the garage and light up,” I listened to a new voice. I call her my compassionate warrior. She said, “Things feel pretty bad, you deserve some self-care and cocoon time. Let’s go lie down in your room and close your eyes and listen to Sarah McLachlan and sing.” It worked!
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What did I really need besides a boost from endorphins and dopamine? For me, it was an escape from people and their needs. I just had to figure out another way to do this, and allow myself to do it. I know, with absolute certainty, I’ll forever be “a puff away from a pack a day.” But now that I understand my triggers and the underlying reasons I smoked, I’m armed with everything I need to keep myself smoke-free.
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