Quitting smoking during a pandemic

The first thing I wanted when all hell broke loose was a cigarette.

Parliament, to be specific. I don't like the discoloration that comes from smoking unfiltered cigarettes, the yellow residue left between your forefinger and middle finger that doesn't seem to ever scrub off. A cigarette lit by a tiny black Bic lighter. Only black. Maybe white if the bodega is out of black lighters and I forgot to grab mine from the living room table. Only monochromatic shades. Smoking is just as much an aesthetic for me as it is an activity that keeps my anxiety at bay.

I love smoking. I love it so fucking much. But when shit hit the fan and coronavirus spread across Europe and hit the United States, I figured it was probably a good idea to give up something that wreaks havoc on my ability to breathe. The coronavirus is a respiratory illness. I want to continue breathing. Smoking will eventually kill me, but at least it wouldn't be in the next month. That's how I thought of it, anyway.

So I quit.

What a fucking mistake.

I decided to quit smoking on my eight-hour drive from Brooklyn to Toronto. I'm Canadian and, as much as I love living in New York City, I thought if I'm going to rely on any medical system, Canada's is hard to beat. Plus, my parents continuously and willingly buy me wine. Not having to pay for your own liquor during a global crisis is a nice added bonus. Seeing them is also great, but the endless supply of fresh cooked dinners and bottles of wine were the real selling point.

I smoked my last cigarette on the stoop of my childhood home, flipping through Twitter because there's nothing else to do when you're smoking by yourself. Every tweet is coronavirus. Shitposting is coronavirus, informational updates are coronavirus, dunking on politicians and celebrities is coronavirus. My leg hasn't stopped shaking since the world turned topsy turvy, and reading Twitter just makes it worse, but I need something to look at. And without my parents Wi-Fi password, TikTok would use up too much data. It was either read about society barreling into darkness on Twitter or watch people try to draw hotdogs with their noses on Instagram. That gives me even more anxiety. Do you know how many times you touch your phone? How many germs are on it? These are the devices we use while pooping, and now people are putting their noses and mouths on the screens!

Smoking was something I took up because of my anxiety. The first time I smoked a cigarette I was 14-years-old. It was high school. I didn't care for it. I smoked joints instead. Smoking didn't become a daily habit until I was in college, trying to stop myself from using an assortment of other things. My leg really started shaking in college. My therapist proclaimed I had an anxiety disorder. And a general depressive disorder. And a mood disorder. She read from the DSM-5 like my grandmother used to read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to me; slightly irritated, rushing through the boring bits, wishing she was literally anywhere else.

My parents don't smoke and, on the rare occasion people in my family did, it was always fancy cigars. I think it made them feel like they were on top of the world. Not that we ever were. Cigarettes were considered pedestrian. I think that's why my brother and I first gravitated toward smoking. It wasn't just a rebellion against parental authority in general, or a general rebellion against the surgeon general whose goal in life seems to be to make us live healthier lives by ensuring we never do anything fun; it was also a rebellion against their idea of what success looked like. Cigarettes, when I was in my first year of college and working at a record store, were an embracement of being a dirtbag teenage. A sulky suburban scumbag dressed in plaid.

By the time smoking became a daily habit, more than an aesthetic and staple of bullshit teenage ideology, it was to maintain my growing anxiety. The older I get, the more scared I become. It's easy to get lost in my own head, and going out for a cigarette, talking to other smokers gathered at bars or outside restaurants, helped soothe the constant gnawing. I told my therapist this. She said it probably had more to do with talking to people and being out in the fresh air. I referenced an old meme and in an obnoxious baby voice asked, "why not both?"

Coronavirus terrifies me. It's not just the virus — though reading stories about healthy twentysomethings suddenly become gravely ill hit me harder than a sudden crush I developed on a M*A*S*H* character who isn't Hawkeye. That crush suddenly appeared on Sunday, midway through a binge session that lasted several hours. What scares me is the period after this one. So much of my anxiety is not knowing what's coming. You're exhausted because you're preparing for everything and anything, not just one thing. Anxiety's not about planning for what's likely to happen, it's running over anything that could happen, every single minute of every single day.

When it gets overwhelming, I go out for a smoke. I get outside, I take in the sounds of Manhattan or Brooklyn (never, ever Queens), and everything resets. The gnawing recedes a little. Everything becomes more manageable. I don't know, man. It's as close to peaceful as I've experienced. Or something.

I keep wondering if I'll start smoking again after life returns to some kind of normalcy. I don't want to. I don't want to quit quitting. That would make me a double quitter! Or maybe it's like two negatives equalling a positive and actually returning to smoking would make me a winner. Math is complicated, and I'm not going to try to validate a vice through some kind of weird moral algebra. All I know is that I haven't had a cigarette in 192 hours. It's the longest I've gone without smoking in a long time. It's hard. I texted my 84-year-old grandfather to let him know that until I could stop myself from being irrationally angry all the time we'd have to just text. Heart emoji, smile emoji, thumbs up emoji. He doesn't know how to send emoji back, but he likes seeing them pop up on his old Android phone.

Maybe this isn't the worst. Maybe this is when I kick smoking for good. I don't know. I haven't really thought about it until today. I think I feel okay.