Nail biting, endless headaches, and countless chewed gum pieces; quitting smoking is a lot harder than I had imagined or cared to admit to myself up to this point. It’s only been three days, but the struggle is real. It truly feels like I’m becoming a new person, and that’s really where the transformation is most exhilarating and frightening.
I still remember my first cigarette. In fact, I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the past couple of days. I was just a kid, an impressionable high school freshman who was not only very angry at the world for its numerous inequalities, but also couldn’t wait to grow up and somehow fix it all with his magical mind. That was really how and why I started smoking. To me, it was a tool that had allowed me to look older and have people take me, and all of my thoughts, seriously for once. I smoked my first cigarette in an alley across the street from my school when I was 13. I’m now 22 and have finally realized that smoking is a problem, one that I couldn’t help but ignore for so long, despite knowing that finding a solution was as imperative as any other necessity in my life.
Indeed, what I’ve come to understand is that giving up cigarettes is really like losing a part of you. It’s not just the physical craving of nicotine; what we’re more addicted to are the cigarette breaks, the social cigarettes, and the first impressions that people have of us when they find out that we smoke. I believe that smoking, especially in Egypt and the Middle East, is more of a social addiction than a physical one. It’s really more of a tool for expression and identification in our society. If that sounds like an overstatement to you, I really don’t blame you. The bond between a smoker and their cigarettes is really impossible to understand if you’ve never smoked a cigarette in your life. And this is what I’m forcing myself to lose, that extra limb that seemingly allowed me to stay up, think, and concentrate more efficiently than I would have without it. To me, the craziest part of all of this is that my decision to leave it all behind didn’t come after strenuous weighing of the pros and cons. It just suddenly dawned on me that I was subjecting myself to an abusive relationship that couldn’t possibly get any better going forward.
So, I decided to quit immediately. It didn’t make sense for me to try to phase it out gradually since I’m well aware, by now, of how clandestine addiction can be. The only way to succeed, in my eyes, was to cold turkey the living heck out of my every addictive desire, and believe me, there were many. It hasn’t been easy, but honestly, it hasn’t been as hard as I had expected it to be for the first three days.
Day 1:
The first day wasn’t so bad. I got the trademark nicotine-deprived headache, but not much else. The cravings were virtually non-existent and my mood was fairly pleasant.
Day 2:
The second was quite different, though. Along with the headache, which truly felt unending at that point, I started getting considerably cranky and the only way to satisfy my unrelenting cravings was through obsessively chewing gum. I thankfully survived the day through locking myself in my room and keeping myself firmly occupied. What I really started to understand was that smoking was just a way to feel less bored and be more engaged during the banality of everyday life. I found that the best quitting exercise is to replace the time that we spend smoking with other activities that fill up our time.
Day 3:
By the third day, I had realized that that was easier said than done, especially since doing any boring activity really forces us to smoke more. My biggest struggle on the third day was that I was back at work after a long weekend and had to not only go through Sunday’s mundanities, but also to not let my performance and concentration levels be clouded by all the smoke that was roaming around my mind. Of course, that was in addition to the actual smoke that my colleagues kept blowing in my face all day long. I wouldn’t say that I succeeded; I merely survived the day, and that was all that really mattered.
Day 4:
Halfway through day four, it still doesn’t feel like I’ll ever go through a day without thinking about cigarettes and it’s still very hard for me to think like a non-smoker. This feels like a hiatus more than a conclusion. I keep telling myself that this shouldn’t matter, and that I should never put myself in a situation where I end up smoking a cigarette ever again, all the while envisioning a future where I have a social cigarette every now and again to be the ideal ending to this foggy relationship. I now realize, though, that this contradiction is the battle between my mind and my addiction. I’ve won every fight up to this point, but only time will tell if I could win the war. I’m losing a part of me either way.