Happy new year, and welcome to Crushball!
Here’s a brief history: I used to smoke. That tells you enough about a person, it’s the introduction I think you’re looking for. I quit last year, which tells you even more about me, and in a roundabout way, it explains why I made a Substack. I needed something to plant in the newly conquered ground– more frequent writing, and better writing for having better advice. I finally have the permission to do that because I’m finally older than I was when I started smoking, and free to grow older still. We all have stories inspired by the vices we’ve chosen and they’re autobiographical by design. This is a good way for you to feel you know me.
I started smoking at 16 and it’s hard to know where the decision was made. It could’ve been in Redhill station– I used to pass through it on my way to Sixth Form (a halfway school for 16-to-18-year-olds in the UK and parts of the Caribbean), and it was a place where damning choices were made. When I think of it, I remember the unconditional opening on platform one which led to a smoking area that, as memory dictates, always gave way to a yellow sky. I used to go there for the 10 minutes between my connecting trains, because I had something I could do with that time. I would use those 10 minutes to decide if I was going to turn back. I turned back the day I bought my first packet of cigarettes. I got on a train returning south, and cried on a carriage full of adults who didn’t know what to do with me.
It doesn’t matter where it began for me, obviously. Those kinds of details are only romantic. What is known and what is important is that smoking was a response. It was the answer to a question: ‘I’m 16, who will I be?’ and the other more injurious question: ‘how will I cope?’ I started smoking, because that is how I chose to manage a precarious period of transition: leaving one place and moving on to something I couldn’t quite foresee. It’s a decision I went on to make time and time again, first implemented with the cognitive limitations of a teenager, and last implemented as a 25-year-old in transition, who’d quit two months before her 25th birthday, but could not forsake a dying remedy. Smoking and other sensations were no longer in the business of suspending agony, by that time. It no longer pretended to help when I collided with people I didn’t want to collide with, or when I had to manage expectations I didn’t want to manage, when I had to suffer confusion, or when I had to lose.
I quit smoking because there was fear I’d die a smoker. I wanted to see if my hair would get longer, and I wanted to see if I could end something. I wanted to age with the privileges of doing so– in as skin deep a sense as imaginable, initially. I realise now a part of ageing gracefully includes optimising the experiences that are most capable of wrinkling you, becoming more capable on account of surviving and surviving well, thicker muscles, denser bones— these are choices. It took the full year to quit successfully. The ritual of smoking was always large in my mind, it was a great partner in both shallow and deep moments. But I’m over it, I’m older now, that is something I’ve allowed. I wanted you all to know that before we continue on.
-Abbie