Girl on the Net

Back in August last year, I wrote a post called ‘love is an addiction’. In that blog, which I typed up as a distraction to help me hold off the urgent, all-encompassing desire to text my ex-boyfriend, I said this…

“It feels like trying to quit smoking – an exercise as vital as it is futile, at which I have failed every single time I’ve tried. But I still haven’t sent that text so now I wonder if the wasted, flabby muscle that might once have been my willpower is growing with each passing day. Perhaps every text I compose and do not send builds that muscle up – flexes it, makes it stronger. Maybe if I can make it through the next six months, I can make that muscle strong enough that it’ll haul me through to the end of my smoking addiction. Wouldn’t that be a thing?”

Well, here’s a thing: I quit smoking.

Bye bye bestie

To those of you who have never smoked, or the lucky few who manage to smoke on a big night out but ditch it the next day without trouble, the following post might seem absurd. But just as I’m willing to tell you about my terrible sex accidents, so I’m also happy to look ridiculous if doing so can give a boost to smokers who have little hope they’ll ever manage to quit. Those, like me, for whom smoking has been a lifelong, constant, intrusive, toxic-yet-comforting friend.

Oh yeah: smoking was my friend. For years and years and years. I taught myself to smoke at the age of about fifteen – bumming fags from cooler mates who knew how to inhale without coughing, sloughing off a small part of my reputation for being a nerd. I started on one or two a day, smoked on lunch breaks over giggles in my mate Amy’s garage, the stale smell clinging to our school uniforms as we walked back into lessons. Then a couple in the park after school as well, when we’d pool our change with mates from the other school, scraping together just enough cash for ten Sovereign and a box of matches. Through college, when I used to smoke to mark the time spent alone and miserable sitting on a bench in the park, taking myself up to a pack a day – packs of ten which soon became twenties and then sometimes more if there was a party or a pub or a hot smoking dude to impress. At university, where my flatmates and I breathed a husky sigh of relief when we realised we were all OK with smoking not just in the flat but in our bedrooms. In Japan, where I lived alone for the first time in my life, filling my tiny studio flat with clouds of hazy grey. In London, too, where the requirement for ‘outside space’ meant far more money handed over to shiny-suited estate agents, and functioned purely as a euphemism for ‘somewhere I can smoke.’

Everywhere I’ve lived, every journey I’ve taken, every adventure I’ve embarked upon I’ve left behind a trail of cigarette butts – in ashtrays and flower pots and saucers and candle holders and hundreds upon hundreds of empty cans of Strongbow.

My best estimate is that, over the course of my life, I’ve smoked 151,571 cigarettes. One hundred and fifty-one thousand, five hundred and seventy one. That’s about 75 litres (or 16 gallons) of butts. To put that into context, the average adult human is around 62 litres (thanks, Google!). I’m larger than the average adult human, so I reckon 75 litres is a fairly good approximation of my own body mass. This means that if I gathered up all the fag butts I’ve discarded over a lifetime, I could make a full-sized sculpture of the stupid prick who smoked them all.

But as I say, smoking was my friend. Cigarettes were comfort and solace and hope and love. I’d smoke when I was happy, to celebrate finishing a blog post or fucking a hot guy. I’d smoke when I was sad, because those moments were the ones when I most needed something to do with my hands and mouth. Smoke to pass the time while waiting for someone, smoke to keep company with friends once they arrived, and then smoke to mark the moment of calm after everyone had said goodbye. Smoke to wake up, smoke to calm down. Chain-smoke as a kind of self-harm when I knew I’d done something wrong. Smoke during good times to feel so fucking alive.

Smoking wasn’t something I did, it was who I was. I wasn’t just a person who smoked, I was a smoker. The weight of that is carried differently – in defiant insistence that I cannot stay in a nice hotel with no balconies if a shittier hostel with a smoking room is available. In the way I’d shrug and say ‘it’s an addiction – what ya gonna do?’ if anyone dared to acknowledge it. Anxiously tapping my foot during otherwise-heartfelt chats because I was looking for a break point to nip outside and smoke. The repeated, defiant mention of smoking in dating site profiles to ensure I wouldn’t fall for a man who might dare to ask me to quit.

It was present in conversations with my Mum about smoking, which started off with a bollocking when I was fifteen years old and got into her car after drama practice reeking of fags, having snuck one with my friends down the alley when I thought she’d be late to pick me up. The tone of her bollocking later turned to gentle admonishment, as I got older and more defensive of my habit. Then that turned to her subtly nudging or suggesting or hinting and then eventually – heartbreakingly – to her quietly accepting that this was just who I had become.

How do you quit smoking?

I’m aware that this blog post sounds almost quaint. So few people smoke these days that banging on about quitting feels like boasting that you’ve ditched your horse and cart. But although we’re quite literally a dying breed (common smokers’ joke, innit), there are still plenty of people like me who smoke and cannot conceive of how they might stop. Loads who try, and fail, with patches and ecigs and nicotine gum and sheer willpower. Those who are still in the phase I describe above probably won’t want to read this post, and I get it. Six months ago I wouldn’t have wanted to read it either – it’s smug, self-congratulating, pontificating shit and you know it will not help you. I get it. But there might be a few of you – or maybe even just one – feeling the pull of wanting to quit but unsure how to go about it.

I’ve spoken to many ex-smokers over the years, and my questions to those who went from twenty-or-more a day to nothing were always the same: how and why? So in case you’re thirsty for this info like I used to be, here goes. Let’s start with the how.

I vape.

And, again, to those of you who haven’t ever smoked this might sound utterly absurd.

You know those things contain nicotine too, right? You know vaping is also expensive and bad for you, right?

Oh right. Yep. Absolutely. I know. Vaping is expensive and bad for you, and if you don’t consume any form of nicotine already you absolutely shouldn’t take it up. But if you smoke? Like smoke smoke? Then switching to vape is a massive positive step. You’re still getting punched in the face every day, but by a glove-cushioned fist instead of a ten-tonne truck.

Besides, without the vape there is no way I’d have made it through the first day of not smoking, let alone the first week. Vape technology has come on leaps and bounds over the last few years, so if you’ve tried it in the past and it hasn’t worked that well, it’s worth having a look at what’s on offer nowadays.

I use a Vuse ePod 2, which is a

• draw-activated
• mouth-to-lung vape
• that uses pods rather than a refillable tank

All of those details are (in my opinion) important. Draw-activated means you don’t have to press a button before you inhale (so it feels more like a cigarette), mouth-to-lung means you take the smoke into your mouth first and then inhale it into your lungs (so it feels more like smoking) and the pods mean you can sling some in your bag or pocket so you don’t have to piss around with coils and refills when you’re out and about.

Peppermint Tobacco and Very Berry, if you care about flavours, but there are lots of different ones (including ‘tobacco’ flavour, which is disgusting and doesn’t taste like real smoking anyway in my opinion). I don’t think it matters which flavours you pick, as long as you pick more than one. Why? Because sometimes you’ll be vaping and find it’s not scratching that itch – it isn’t exactly like a cigarette so your body will keep feeling like it needs SOMETHING. I find being able to switch between flavours helpful here. I bought some Vanilla Medley to add to my collection recently, so now I have three flavours – more switching, more variety, fewer cravings for something worse. Oh, and I bought a spare ePod too because I started with two (one to smoke, one to charge) and one of them died for no reason (the shop immediately replaced it, the lovely fuckers). I was worried that if I had to go through a single evening without being able to quickly switch flavours I might end up wavering, so I added an extra.

Three chargeable vape sticks, a mix of flavours, not a single cigarette since I committed to doing this.

In the interests of full disclosure (and perhaps a little more honesty than I’d usually apply even here but what the hell) I also have a ‘dry herb vaporiser’ for weed. You can experiment with different mix herbs to roll with if you prefer joints – I’ve tried both marshmallow leaf and raspberry leaf, of which the latter gave a way better smoke – but I ditched those too because frankly it’s still smoking, and that felt too much like cheating for me. Your mileage, as ever, may vary.

It’s also significant that I’m doing this in the year 2022. Not many people smoke these days, vape technology is infinitely better than it used to be, and in the UK we’re discouraged from smoking in a number of helpful ways. I know people complain about the ‘nanny state’ when it comes to smoking bans, but this is one area where I’m more than happy to be nannied and nudged and all but smacked upside the head if it helps me to achieve the seemingly impossible.

On top of all this, I have the NHS Quit Smoking app to keep track of progress as well as friends and family who send me lovely cheerleading messages when I tell them I’m quitting. I’ve been letting myself tell one or two new people each day – partly to avoid making one big announcement then having to slink back and retract it if I fail, and partly to give myself a little daily treat. I still haven’t tired of typing the sentence ‘I quit smoking!’ – it feels miraculous, like I’m telling them I’ve won the fucking lottery – so letting myself say it to someone new each day is as good a way as any to motivate me through to the next.

Why did I quit smoking?

Perhaps more importantly, let’s do the whys. In my NHS Quit Smoking app, it lets you pick from their list of reasons to quit smoking as well as add in some of your own. I have six:

I want to date non-smoking men

Since I broke up with my ex, only one of the people I’ve shagged has been a smoker. One! And although this non-smoking version of me is more than happy to get down with smoking dudes, I’m uncomfortable with it the other way round. When you’re dating people who don’t smoke, my God do you notice how intrusive your own smoking can be. After sex, I go outside to smoke. Before sex, I go out to smoke. During dates, I will cut conversations short with ‘hold that thought, I’m getting antsy, can I go have a fag and come back in a sec?’ If we meet in a pub, I’m angling to sit outside even if it’s freezing, because chain-smoking with a pint, even in the bitter chill of winter, is preferable to sitting inside where I have to abstain. Over lockdown, I’d often find myself smoking two in a row to stock up on nicotine in my blood before visiting my support bubble dude, then chewing gum on the way upstairs to his flat so I could give him a welcome kiss that was probably not as nice as if I hadn’t smoked anything at all.

So. Yeah. I want to fuck men who don’t smoke. I want to kiss them, deeply and eagerly, without feeling like they’re grossed out by my breath. I want to hold them in my arms and inhale the gorgeous scent of them: men, lovely men. With their shower-gel and shampoo and aftershave and fabric softener. Sweat and pheromones and (if I’m lucky) their spunk.

I want to improve my health

An obvious one, sure, but I’ve not met any wannabe ex-smoker who doesn’t have this on their list.

I’m sick of smelling smoke

Ditto.

I’m worried about the impact of smoking on my appearance

Thanks to my recent birthday, I’ve become obsessed with how clearly my age is written on my face. A friend gave me some anti-ageing cream, and I started using it, noticing almost immediately how much better I look when ever-so-slightly glowing with thorough moisturisation. That same lovely friend talked to me about Botox, and I realised that not only would a course of Botox cost roughly the same as a month’s worth of cigarettes, it wouldn’t be as effective as kicking the fags in the first place. Which leads me neatly onto…

I want to save money

Big deep breath: I am very poor at the moment. Not so poor that I can’t pay my mortgage, but poor enough that in order to do that I perform a credit-card shuffle every month – dumping debt onto a balance transfer card and praying for a windfall sometime soon. There will be no windfall, except in my dreams, and the debt I’ve built up this way will take three smokefree years to pay off.

I’ve always had a rule that Patreon money would never be used to fund what I’ll loosely call my ‘lifestyle’ (by which I mean ‘my tendencies towards extreme hedonism: booze, fags, [REDACTED] and Toffee Crisps’) – the money I spend on enjoying myself comes from ads and affiliate stuff and commissioned work like books, articles, copywriting etc, and that’s where most of my living expenses come from too. Patreon is mostly used to keep the site running (hosting, email, whatever it is that Cloudflare does, guest bloggers and audio, illustrations, printing and posting out cards + stickers and other merchy things) with a bit left over that helps me pay the gas bill or council tax.

Recently, in a panic about the credit cards, I spent a few hours frantically hunting for extra things that might help me pay off that debt, or at least prevent me from accumulating more. And I realised that all these extras would take time away from what I most want to do (blogging and audio, primarily), and it made me feel like shit. Because let’s face it, if I’m frantically working to pull in extra contracts, stressing myself out trying to rustle up new work, and then smoking to ease the stress of it all, that’s an objectively terrible way to spend a precious life. And life is precious. Our time on this planet is so fleeting and so important. I believe that of other people, profoundly and deeply: each person’s life is precious and it matters. Why not try to believe it of my own?

I’m getting ahead of myself. We’re doing money. So while we’re on the subject of money, tinkering at the edges of my budget – buying cheap food from TooGoodToGo then batch-cooking it before it goes off, refusing to put the heating on if I don’t have guests, cycling everywhere so I don’t have to tap my card on the tube – all that feels mad when there’s a far bigger item on the spreadsheet: smoking.

I’m fucking broke, team. Broke as fuck. And although a lot of the blame can be chalked up to me being genuinely terrible at business, I could certainly make a difference by not setting fire to the best part of three hundred quid a month.

In these early days, I’m using the vape to help me break the habit. It’s a pretty expensive kit, and the pods I use work out at around £4 per day. But £4 per day is far less than £11, and after a month or so I’ll lower the nicotine in the pods, then drop it further, until eventually I kick the vaping too.

If not now, when?

This is the most motivating reason, if I’m honest. I tried to give up smoking at University – a promise made to my then-boyfriend who hated kissing me when I stank of smoke. For three months I wore nicotine patches and exercised my willpower, gaining myself the only cool nickname I have ever had in my life (‘Patches’! So cute! Such a thing to be proud of! I’d earned the ‘Patches’ moniker by virtue of my virtue, and I was so sad when the boy who’d coined it told me – over a cigarette, naturally – that I couldn’t be Patches any more).

I promised myself I would give up smoking when I moved abroad, because New Life New Start. Then when I moved back to the UK, where smoking in pubs had recently been banned. When I got my first flat on my own, I was going to quit then too: I even engaged the (useless) services of a hypnotherapist to help me. Then I promised I would quit when I was thirty. Then again at thirty-five. When I joined a trial to test the effectiveness of different tools for smoking cessation (trial completed, smoking continued). Last year, in the autumn, I downloaded the NHS app and told myself I’d quit for Stoptober.

Barring those three months at uni, and the odd aborted quit attempt lasting no more than a day, I have smoked for my entire adult life. I promise myself I’ll give up in winter when it gets too cold to go outside, in summer when I get back from holiday. After I’ve left this job or when I’ve finished writing that book. At Christmas, because I’ll be with my family. After this particular baby is born, because I’ll want to cuddle them without having to change all my clothes. And then after the next baby, because I didn’t manage it with the first, and the howling guilt that envelops me as I write that sentence should have been enough to make me stop back then. But I continued: it’s an addiction, remember? What ya gonna do?

I’d give up later! After this event. After that date.

After after after after.

Later. Not now: later.

I’ve spoken to many smokers whose answer to the question ‘why did you quit?’ was ‘it just felt like time.’ And I hate to give you something so vague, which is why this reason – the most important one – is buried here, so close to the end. I’m putting it after all this explanation so you can maybe see a little of what I mean when I tell you that now just felt like time.

Time to quit smoking

It was my birthday in the middle of March, and quitting smoking was my gift to myself. I went to the vape shop the week before, bought the kit, read the NHS guidance over and over until I could picture myself doing it. Then I smoked with my friends at my birthday party, savouring the closeness and comfort and warmth and toxicity of the cigarettes that I’d loved for so long. The next day I gave up for good.

Perhaps that’s why it’s been a bit easier than I thought. I get the odd burst of disappointment when my brain fires habitual ‘have a fag!’ messages at me after dinner, or with coffee, or post-sex, and I remember that I won’t ever do that again. Sometimes a slight pull of longing when I walk past the corner shop where they know me well enough to grab my brand off the shelf before I’ve even asked for it. But I’ve experienced less of the hair-tearing, itchy, twitching withdrawal or grief – because it is grief, smoking was my friend, remember? – that I’ve had during previous attempts. It’s partly the vaping, of course: this system is far more effective than ones I’ve used in the past, although it’s not much different to Juul, which I’ve also tried and failed with.

It’s not just the vaping, it just feels like my time.

I’m one week in as I write this and I’m confident I’ll make it to two (if you’re reading this post, I did!). From there it’s a short step to three. And then four and then five then forever. As I write this, while crying like an extremely emo baby, I’ve already not-smoked for the longest period of time since I first became Patches at the age of nineteen.

To paraphrase that age-old saying: the best time to quit smoking was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

Why are you telling us you quit smoking?

I’m aware of the down-sides of writing this: if I fail again, I’ll look silly. And even if I succeed I look horribly smug. Either way, I’m wasting a post on some personal news that – on the surface – has nothing to do with sex or relationships or dating or hot ways to spaff at the end of a wank.

But I have smoked for twenty three years, team! Longer than I’ve even been having sex. Cigarettes are entwined with all my core memories: happy, sad, exciting, weird, emotional, sexy and everything in between. There was not a single thing I ever did that wasn’t punctuated with a cigarette. If you made a montage of my life’s highlights to date, all of them would be seen through a cloud of smoke. This isn’t just a big thing for me, it’s the Biggest Thing I’ve ever made myself do. And although my traitorous brain still sometimes mourns the loss of this constant friend, a far larger part wants to hug myself with joy when I realise I’ve actually done it! I’ve achieved something that, if I’m truly honest with myself (and you lot), I spent the last twenty years genuinely convinced I would never be able to do.

I could spend the rest of this year doing nothing whatsoever and I’ll still be miles up on where I would be if I’d continued on that same path. At the end of each day, if I’m tempted to berate myself for not doing enough exercise or forgetting to put the laundry out, I can instantly banish those thoughts by reminding myself that ‘hey! I fucking quit fucking smoking!’ All else is nonsense and ephemera.

If I ever fall in love with a new guy – someone with pretty eyes and a penchant for fucking – I will hug that man so tight my friends. Inhale his scent deeply into my fresh, clean lungs, noting tones and flavours that would have gone unnoticed to the woman who once smoked twenty fags a day. I’ll sniff him like flowers and fresh laundry. I will huff him down like paint stripper, safe in the knowledge that although I’ll always be an addict for love, after twenty three years, I finally quit smoking.

Me! The queen of fags!

I fucking quit!

Come sniff me.

Update: As I say above, I wrote this post a week after I’d quit. I occasionally popped back in to edit and re-read when I needed to remind myself why I was doing this. Having it there to pick away at when I waver has proved quite helpful too. 

Since I wrote it, lots has happened – I’ve shagged one more smoker, and my resolve did not collapse. Vaping to match him when we nipped outside the pub felt natural and calm and right. I made out with him loads too, and it was gooooood. I’ve sat outside pubs, drunk, with friends who smoke, and been happy enough with my vape sticks and smug smile. I have hugged babies and played with them without having to change all my clothes. I’ve taken my Mum out for dinner and apologised for the way I dismissed her. Been out with non-smoking friends and proudly showed off my new skill of not-chain-smoking-while-we-drink. I’ve had evenings with my toyboy where, instead of nipping outside to smoke then brushing my teeth swiftly after, I could relax into hours of chat and fucking with no self-imposed interruptions. I’ve even caught up with my lovely support bubble guy – the one who had to kiss his way through stale smoke and chewing gum first time round. And yeah, of course, I sniffed him. I sniff them all. They smell so fucking good. Life is good. 

It’s been four weeks.