23. American Spirit Blues.
When I was a child, my father smoked Carlton cigarettes in an endless stream: at the kitchen table, in the bathroom, in the yard, in the car, at his desk, at the bedside table. Saturday mornings, I loved to crawl into my parents’ bed and burrow my face into his neck, in the place where the sleepy smell of sweat, Canadian Club whiskey, Caribe Bahamian cologne, and nicotine constellated over the birthmark between his clavicle and his Adam’s apple, his olive skin sundark against his bleachbright v-neck undershirt.
Even as a novice smoker, the Carltons I swiped were too weak for me, so, summer after 8th grade, my best friend and I set out to get some real cigarettes. We walked from my house, through the leafy, landscaped subdivision, up to the fresh tar and paint of the newly-expanded four lane road, past the Kroger’s and the Eckerd’s and the Turtle’s Records and Tapes, past the tiny roadside graveyard ringed in red clay and rusted white wrought iron sticking out like a sore thumb: the only indication—aside from the occasional old mule behind someone’s house—that this place existed at all before the strip malls and the parking lots; incongruous, unsettling.
At the Texaco, we sidled up to the counter, two literal children, and asked the attendant for a “pack of Camels.” “Regular or filters?” he asked, without hesitation. We were not expecting this question. We quickly conferred, and decided on regulars, not knowing that there was such a thing as unfiltered cigarettes, and figuring that regular was, well, regular. He blithely charged us the two dollars and we took our soft pack of unfiltered Camels back to her house that night. After her mother went to bed, we stepped out of the sliding glass doors onto the back patio and smoked the unfiltered Camels until we got high, got the spins, and then violently retched. Once I recovered, there was no turning back: I was all in.
In high school, my brand was Marlboro reds, and by my freshman year in college at UGA, where students could choose between a smoking or a non-smoking dorm room, I was smoking 2 packs a day. In those days, in that place, tobacco was still king: everybody I knew smoked, everywhere.
In Boston, I started smoking American Spirits in the blue pack; they were twice as expensive as Marlboros but ostensibly natural and additive-free, and objectively a better-tasting, longer-lasting, more substantial cigarette. I always was a diligent worker, but I never had a job where I didn’t get in trouble for taking too many smoke breaks; one of my favorite things about owning my own business was getting to smoke whenever I wanted to, and I did.
I quit easily when I was pregnant, that time out of time, but afterwards, oooh, how I relished the old familiar rite, the first time I went for a drive without the baby. Every step was instinctive: purchasing the pack, thwacking it against the heel of my palm, unwrapping the cellophane, then the foil, pulling out the first cigarette by the butt with my fingernails and wedging it between my lips. The flicker of flame, the first pull, the crackle, the lick of smoke, the exhale. The tingle on the tongue. Like taking my body back, like reclaiming my agency. Like coming home.
For almost as long as I smoked, which is to say, for 28 years, I wanted to quit, or at least I wanted to want to quit, and I tried—halfheartedly at first, and then with ever increasing urgency—but the trouble was, I just never could figure out how. Every time I smoked a cigarette, the clock reset, and I had a finite number of minutes before I had to smoke again. If I didn’t or couldn’t, a series of alarms began to sound in my brain: my head got cloudy, distant, distracted, agitated, my tongue thickened, my feet started to float away. Then, the panic. Conversely, when I could smoke freely, the opposite was true: I was smarter, clearer, more clever, more focused, grounded, intact.
I woke up every morning, coughing calamitously, and vowed not to smoke, but even the mere idea of not smoking made me crave a cigarette so badly that all other thoughts were edged out, and the need to smoke clamored more and more loudly until, within minutes, I gave in, reluctantly, and resolved to try harder tomorrow.
It’s exhausting, and also demoralizing, this cognitive dissonance: knowing with all your heart that you have to stop something, for your health, your well-being, your finances, to stop harming and aggravating and distancing yourself from the people you love, to know all of that and yet to simply be unable to find a path from here to there? It cuts to the core of one’s sense of self, of one’s sense of integrity, of one’s sense of having any kind of efficacy in the world.
And yet, in my personal cognitive narrative that I repeat to myself incessantly about my recovery—in my ongoing attempt to organize the timeline, to understand what, exactly, the fuck has happened here—I almost never think about how I quit smoking before I quit anything else. For some reason, it’s invisible to me, when in fact, it was the first quit, the biggest quit, the hardest quit of all.
Because “cold turkey” had proven impossible, I had long attempted to cut down; I purchased handmade nicotine lollipops from the natural compounding pharmacy down the road, I tried herbal cigarettes, nicotine gum, the patch. They all worked until they didn’t, because the brain only has a finite amount of willpower, and when you’ve used it all up, it’s gone, and only the cravings remain.
In 2013, I stumbled across a book that I had seen recommended by several people, called “The Easy Way to Stop Smoking” by Alan Carr. The reason I read it is because I heard that you don’t have to stop smoking until you finish reading the book, and in fact, you are encouraged to keep smoking while you read it. A way to quit smoking while still smoking? Sign me up! I read the book, and kept smoking, and while I cannot emphasize enough how weird and poorly written this book is, it was also like some kind of old British man magic spell: without knowing how or why or even exactly when, after I finished the book, I quit smoking, feeling more raw and vulnerable than I ever remembered feeling, but also building upon the feeling of success, of stringing together days, of taking care of myself.
Three years later, camping on Lake Santeetlah on my 40th birthday, I got a case of the fuckits and I bummed a cigarette from a friend. Within a week I was back to smoking 10-15 cigarettes a day. It took me another two years to quit again, again by reading the book, by returning to what I learned about how to quit. How to, instead of relying on willpower, expand my window of tolerance for the discomfort of withdrawal, even by a millisecond. How to interrogate my assumptions: am I specifically bad at doing things, or is nicotine a highly addictive drug that has been ruthlessly marketed to vulnerable people? Are cigarettes making me calm, or is smoking relieving my withdrawal symptoms that wouldn’t be there in the first place if I didn’t smoke? What if I listened to my body? What if I prioritized my own needs? What if I said no. What if I treated myself like a precious child in need of care, rather than a piece of shit who can’t figure it out? I quit again, I strung together days, and now it’s been five years.
There’s a lot about Philly that reminds me of the South of my childhood, and the ubiquitous smoking is one of those things. People smoke everywhere here, including on the subway, on the train cars and platforms an mezzanines beneath the city: cigars, blunts, cigarettes. Most of the time, I’m annoyed to have to tolerate it, annoyed that if someone gets on my train car with a lit cigarette, my mask will instantly and permanently reek of moldering, stale smoke, and I will have to throw it away. But sometimes, outside, if the weather is right, someone’s cigarette smoke will hit my face and all of a sudden, I’m 16 years old, it’s late autumn in Georgia, the air is crisp, the wind is blowing the leaves around in swirls, and I’m saving myself from dying of boredom behind the Saturday school detention trailer at Joseph Wheeler High.
When I ask my clients, women with opioid use disorder, what triggered them to return to substance use after a period of abstinence, the most common answer is grief, the death of a loved one, particularly if the death was fraught, or complex, or they blamed themselves. But the second most common answer is, simply, “I got bored.” Bored, restless, agitated, dysregulated. For those of us who did not have safety in our bodies, for whom the natural process of self-regulation was interrupted, our brilliant, beautiful nervous systems apply whatever remedy is within reach: stimulants, depressants, cutting, restricting food, smoking. Something to feel alive, something to bring your feet back to earth, something to tolerate the discomfort, the boredom, the vast, existential nothingness that threatens to consume us when we don’t know how to sit still within ourselves because of the burdens we carry for other people.
, in his perfect newsletter The Small Bow, wrote a beautiful, empathic piece this week about David from Sesame Street: “I’ll admit this: I am always tense when walking my children around our family-friendly Los Angeles neighborhood. The city's homeless population is overwhelming, and we've had some incidents that have rattled me. One time while Julieanne was parked at a stoplight on the way to take our son to school, a man tried to open the backdoor of the car where my son was strapped in the baby seat. Another time there was a man walking up and down the sidewalk outside our door late at night, shouting truly vile and terrifying nonsense. ‘I’m gonna kill all you motherfuckers!’ Things of that nature.”I love his writing so much, in particular because he cannot help but to see the darkest shadow of every bright light (I mean how do you write a 2600 word essay about mental illness, death, and addiction with the most beloved children’s show of all time as your premise? Slow clapping over here).
But he’s right. The crisis of homelessness, a crisis driven by untreated mental illness and untreated substance use disorder, which is, in turn, caused by a crisis of meaning and connection, is coming for us all. Every day on the way to work, I step over bodies splayed out on the sidewalk, the stairwells, the street corners. I pause, I watch for the movement of breath to see if I need to administer Narcan, then I keep it moving. But even if you don’t live in a big city, it’s coming for you, for your “family-friendly neighborhood,” your workplace, your bright-eyed daughter.
It’s getting late and I’m hungry and I’ve lost the thread of how to say what I’m trying to say, but I need to press send so I’ll do my best to make my point: this is not about how successful I am at quitting things. This is about how everything is drugs, and also how everything is recovery. This is about how drinking and smoking and drugs work until they don’t, how they make sense until they don’t; how they are the perfect fuck you, opt-out, trap door escape from every untenable situation, and will be forever, until we stop putting people in untenable situations and waiting for them to sink or swim.
This is about how we are not, in any meaningful way, different from the people splayed out on the street, or anyone who smokes or snorts or shoots up or cuts or throws up, and how when you are in active addiction you know all the reasons why you must stop and at the same time you are not able to find any path from here to there and it is a particular form of anguish to have to sit with that discrepancy.
This is also about how the smallest increment of change can be the fractal seed that iterates bigger and bigger change, that shame changes nothing, ever and that it is only the smallest, most incremental changes that actually matter, that actually add up to a sea change, that actually lead to a place where, by feat of willful magic, you wake up one day to discover that your boredom has turned into something that looks like peace, something that looks like comfort, something that feels like coming home.
The World
Is it just me or are we living in a golden age of personal essay? I read so many incredible pieces this week. Here’s a few:
Proud Flesh by Catherine Gray:
Goddammit, Laurie Stone did it again, this time about (almost) not caring what other people think about you:
And from Rachel Yoder in Harper’s Magazine, this incredibly beautiful meditation on (gestures widely) everything, through the lens of Pennsylvania Dutch rootwork/folk medicine: In the Glimmer.
A Card
The Hanged One.
According to the Modern Witch Tarot guidebook by Lisa Sterle: “True peace can only come from within. Finally, it’s the calm after the storm. You might have just had some tough battles or obstacles to conquer, but now it’s time to relax a bit. Meditate, slow down, nurture your body and soul. You might have to sacrifice something in order to reach this state of zen, but don’t worry. There’s no right or wrong way to do it.”
I think of the Hanged Man as an embrace of sacrifice and the discomfort of the liminal state as the gateway to new life. The imagery is an echo of Odin and the World Tree, of Buddha and the Bodhi Tree, of Christ and the cross: it’s the moment when we relinquish control and let the thing that is happening happen, when we let the river flow, when we let go of who we think we are in service to who we must become. May all your sacrifices be made holy, today and every day.
Home + The World features personal essay, recipes, links and recommendations exploring the ways we become exiled: through trauma, addiction, oppression, grief, loss, and family estrangement; and the ways we create belonging: through food and cooking, through community care and recovery and harm reduction, through therapy and witchcraft and making art and telling stories and taking pictures and houseplants and unconditional love and nervous system co-regulation and cake. Currently, all content is free; the paid subscriber option is a tip jar. Thank you for being here and thank you for being you.
⚔️❤️ Jodi
I was lucky to have been splayed out on the street for only a few days. Most people aren’t so lucky and don’t have the same support. The first step is realizing it could happen to anyone. We’re all the same in that regard.
Thank you for sharing this.
Intimate, meaningful, raw and honest, again, I’m moved by the story, the writing, and the ability to capture an individual experience that is at once universal to those of us that have ever struggled to move our selves beyond addiction. Thanks Jodi for sharing yet another piece of artful writing with the world.