Smoking and Mirrors

Well, last night I took a couple of men to bed with me. Their voices anyway. I have a thing for men with British accents.

Allen Carr got rich helping people quit smoking--though he actually died of lung cancer in 2006 after twenty years smoke free.  (He'd been a chain smoker from the age of 14 until twenty years before his death.)

Paul McKenna is the hypnotist who helped Ellen Degeneres quit on one of her shows--and it was his voice that I fell asleep listening to last night, a relaxed, resonant, and encouraging voice.

I didn't know that Ellen had struggled for years to quit smoking.  Coming out of the other closet was easier than coming out of this one!  I get it.  Smokers feel shame about smoking as it's often referred to by non-smokers as a "filthy habit" and "stupid."  But smokers of a certain age started smoking in a time when smokers were not pariahs.  Doctors often smoked; people smoked openly in cars, restaurants, other people's houses, even on airplanes.  Teachers lounges were like the smokers lounges in airports today.

I started in the late Sixties when we invited a chain-smoking girl my age to come from another state and live with us until she gave birth to her baby.  It was the way it was back then: the parents of the girl sending their "wayward" daughter away for a mysterious few months to hide her condition.  We were both 19, and she was the sister of my husband's friend.

Throughout the years of my marriage, I discovered that I found a particular kind of peacefulness if I smoked in the bathroom--which I continued all these years after divorce. I don't smoke my American Spirit menthol lights in the car, I never smoke the regular brands of American cigarettes that are loaded with additives, and I wouldn't go into a smokers' lounge at the airport on a bet. But I smoke after every meal and before bed--more when writing.

Smoking and writing go together like bread and gravy, birthdays and cake, music and dancing.

I'm not alone on this "road of my own" in the journey to quit; only other smokers know how hard it is to move from the smoking road to the non-smoking one. Cigarettes are the look-forward-to at the end of the day, the come-down after something stressful, the tension-relievers, the company when you're lonely, the happy candles on the birthday cake, the providers of an extra buzz when making decisions.

Last night, I watched a clip of Ellen Degeneres being hypnotized to quit smoking. I watched videos about the  good changes that occur seven hours, seven days, seven years after quitting.  I ordered the book that helped a friend quit.  I made an appointment with a hypnotist for this week.

In years past, I've tried it all: hypnosis (wound up dating the hypnotist a few times and he bought me some super expensive cigarettes: "If you're going to smoke, you should smoke the best," he said); acupuncture, you name it.

I know that the mirror shows what smoking does to the skin--and that's just the surface damage.  I know all the facts, and I know all the reasons to quit.  You don't have to feel ashamed of the smell of smoke in your hair and clothes, for one thing.  But switching to another road is going to take a turbocharged engine and some giant tires and four-wheel-drive climbing power to navigate the bumps and hills I see in the distance.