Breaking a generational craving
By Elizabeth Christman, Gay City Intern
Most of my memories of my father include cigarettes. He always had a hand-rolled cigarette in his hand or a pouch of tobacco and rolling papers in his shirt pocket, ready for his smoke break. He spent hours reading at the kitchen counter, bent over his book and his utterly useless smokeless ashtray, the smell of American Spirits slowly filling the house. He only quit when he was diagnosed with COPD, when he was well into his seventies. The cigarettes he
carried everywhere were replaced with an oxygen tank in the final years of his life.
Growing up, I hated smoking. I hated the smell, the smoke, and the fact that they were most likely slowly killing my dad. I was an anxious kid, and I fretted over his health in a way he never did. In fact, my dad cared so little about taking care of himself, it often felt as if mom and I were picking up the slack and twisting his arm into making better decisions, usually to no avail. I would sometimes steal his tobacco and hide it in an attempt to get him to quit (spoiler alert: this was a terrible strategy that did not work). The one time I actually got the nerve to throw it away, my father was roaring angry with me. Literally. I never touched his smokes after that, and simply committed myself to not becoming a smoker myself.
Easy enough, right? I already hated smoking. It was hard for young me to imagine a future where I had something like that in common with my father.
Famous last words.
Unfortunately, my wishful thinking was naive in its scope. I didn’t understand why my dad smoked in the first place, or addiction, or the odds of his children never touching cigarettes. Therefore, I was poorly equipped to deal with the stress that would hit me later in life. And the odds were certainly not in my favor: according to a study in the American Journal of Public Health, the children of smokers are far more likely to start smoking as teens than the children of non-smokers.
I, of course, resisted the temptation for a while. But once I was in college and on my own, my world became increasingly stressful. I grew up poor, and even though I had received a number of scholarships for school, it was not a full ride. My parents could only help so much financially, so I was largely on my own.
While going to school full time, I also held down a number of part-time jobs to help make ends meet. I worked in the dining halls so the school would comp my meal cards every quarter; I delivered pizzas and worked at late-night restaurants that catered to drunk students; and on the weekends, I worked at a used bookstore where I could order my textbooks at a discount. My schedule was packed, and it was still barely enough to keep me afloat.
Here is where my willpower broke. I was delivering pizzas one night, and it was about midnight. I had class at 11 am the next day, and knew I wouldn’t be finishing my shift until well after 5 a.m. Our delivery radius was huge; I was driving to a neighboring town, and the delivery took me nearly an hour. I stopped at a gas station on the way back, tired down to my nerve endings. And I just sort of…did it. I bought a pack of cigarettes. I thought, maybe this is just what adulthood is like. You’re stressed and tired all the time, so you drink coffee and smoke cigarettes to keep your hands busy and your eyes open.
In a way, I was right. According to the CDC, “people living below the poverty level and people having lower levels of educational attainment have higher rates of cigarette smoking than the general population.”
People struggling with money, who can’t see a way out or can only see
the long road of hardship ahead of them, will take any break they can. Any alleviation will do. At least, that’s how it was for me. I still didn’t like smoking. I still generally disliked the taste of cigarettes, and I intensely disliked the smell of tobacco that clung to my fingers and clothes that reminded me so much of my dad. But I needed something. And despite everything, nicotine did make my body feel a bit less tired and a bit more energized. In a life defined by toil, I would certainly take it.
When I finished grad school, I felt this enormous weight come off my shoulders. I was done. I could focus on something other than the grind, at least for a little while. So, unlike most smokers or former smokers I know, I quit cold turkey. I just stopped buying them because my body no longer needed that extra oomph. When my socioeconomic situation improved, I was
able to give up smoking quite easily. I barely noticed the withdrawal symptoms, because I felt so free.
However, this experience is certainly not universal. Our bodies become dependent on the substances we use, and cigarettes are hard to quit for a reason.
In closing, I’ll leave you with some thoughts on how to effectively quit smoking:
● Gay City Quit Smoking Resources
● Identify why you smoke. This was important for me to quit: knowing it wasn’t the cigarettes, but the stress relief that I craved.
○ Can some other things, done moderately, replace smoking as stress relief?
● Have a plan. Before you quit, make sure you’ve planned ahead. Do you have a specific goal? Try reducing the number of cigarettes you smoke incrementally.
● Manage cravings. Do you have a way to manage your nicotine cravings? Gum or patches can be effective early on.
● You’re not alone. The CDC has a lot of helpful resources online too that will help you quit, many of them from former smokers. You can check it out here.
