When I started to write this, I thought that of all the positive things I have done in my life, giving up smoking has to be the biggest one. But this has turned into so much more than that, it’s turned into an examination of why I smoked at all and the fact that I have replaced it with another, equally damaging for me (though not others) behaviour. I am still very pleased that I stopped smoking because it proves with enough willpower you can do such things…I just need to apply it now to the behaviour I replaced it with…
One sunny early August day in 2020, I was standing at my back door looking over the garden whilst smoking a cigarette thinking, ‘this is disgusting’. It was during Covid, and I had realised when we were in lockdown that I was smoking considerably more. Working from home, every time I made myself a coffee between meetings I was also lighting up a cigarette meaning I was smoking considerably more than the 5 I usually had during a whole working day (1 each in the car to work, 1 mid-morning, 1 at lunch, and 1 mid-afternoon depending on meetings). I was now probably smoking 5 just in the morning. Everything about me reeked of smoke, especially my hair and fingers which I abhorred. I was also aware that the affordability of smoking was not possible in my budget now. My hours had reduced in Covid so I was earning less and smoking had become a luxury I could no longer afford. And, most importantly, my son hated me smoking. I never did so around him, never in the house, and never in the car but I still snuck off to do it and he hated it. As I weighed up these three things, I just thought well, I’ve got to stop. I knew I had some Nicorette chewing gum that I had bought ages before while it had been on special offer, thinking then that I would stop smoking (obviously, I didn’t at that point), so I dug it out. I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing, not even my husband. I had tried and failed so many times over the years, I didn’t want to feel any judgement. And, the rest as they say, is history. I didn’t stay on the gum for long because, frankly, it was disgusting so mostly I stopped through sheer willpower.
I asked myself at the time why I had started smoking in the first place, as a teenager. I suppose it was mostly due to peer pressure, but my grandparents both smoked and I spent an inordinate amount of time with them simply because I adored them. When I was a child, there used to be these candy cigarettes and I used to pretend I was smoking whenever I had them. I had some very glamorous relatives (my grandmother included), and I wanted to emulate them. But, it was also the thing to do and most of my friends at the time smoked, so I did. I suspect, though, that if my grandparents and birth father hadn’t, I likely wouldn’t have done if the example of friends who didn’t smoke is anything to go by. And I’m not blaming them or peer pressure at all, it was my decision. I’m just mooting what perhaps made route into smoking easier, almost more natural.
Over the years, I tried to give up countless times. I had a two year period, several one year periods, and a few six month periods. But I always returned to it. Why? Usually because something significant had happened in my life and I had needed the crutch that smoking somehow provided. When I first went to university (at 23), I was hit with crippling homesickness and turned to cigarettes to help me through. If I smoked, I somehow stopped feeling so bad in that first term. I didn’t smoke as much as I had prior to quitting the year before, but I still had smoked and, as with all such crutches, when I didn’t smoke the hurt came back. So I carried on with my crutch until the habit had returned fully and I found it impossible to stop. Another time, this time after a two year hiatus, I started again when I broke up with an ex because it had hurt so much and having a cigarette in some way helped. Yet another time when my dog died suddenly, because I wasn’t able to cope with the upset without that support mechanism I associated smoking with. As I look back to write this, I realise that something significant would happen in my life, something really painful and I would turn to cigarettes to dull the pain. Usually to stop me from crying, from expressing my emotions which is something I have long been uncomfortable doing.
So, what was different this time? I’ve had some pretty momentous and painful things hit me in the last 5 years, but I never thought to return to smoking. Instead, I turned to food. As I thought about the writing of this, I realised that I replaced one destructive habit with another. Because food is as deadly if it’s the wrong type and eaten in large quantities, as smoking. And for me, both are about suppressing emotions. Going to cry? I used to reach for the cigarette box, now I turn to the cupboard or the fridge. Feeling upset and as though your life is not working out how you wanted? Go to the fridge now the cigarettes are gone. Suppress the emotions, because feeling them is far more uncomfortable than wearing clothes I dislike because of their size or feeling the pinch around clothes that no longer fit me.
It stems from my childhood, of course. From the age of 10 until the age of 18, I had one hit after another. One significant trauma on top of another until, by the time I was 18 I had switched off my emotions. In those teenage years I had never been taught how to deal with these events, it was just a case of stiff upper lip and keep going. You woke up every day and I took pride in carrying on. I didn’t fall apart, never fall apart was like a mantra in my family. Don’t get the emotions out and deal with them, that was self-pitying and we had no time for that. We had to just get on with it. Crying resolves nothing was something I often told myself, and confiding in people? I didn’t really have anyone to confide in who wouldn’t want to just brush it under the carpet because they didn’t know how to deal with it themselves. Plus, they had their own burden to carry. I had no idea that I was getting more and more laden down with this burden of unresolved trauma until I just switched off because it became too much. It was easier to not really feel, to have a superficial approach to most things in life because any more investment was more than I could cope with. It was my safety mechanism. Smoking became a release valve in some way, something I subconsciously relied upon because it gave me some measure of comfort. It didn’t give me the hangover that drinking did, and I was too nervous to take other drugs so it was the crutch available to me. And one that my friends also indulged in, so it was a social thing as well. If I ate too much and started to put on weight, I would be gently shamed into going on a diet by my family so food couldn’t be that crutch though it probably would have been one of choice. Both are a version of self-harm.
The face I showed to the world was never the true me, as with most people, and along the way I lost who the true me was. Things I felt, the way I thought was deemed ‘wrong’ so I curbed it and felt ashamed of it. I towed the line, did as I was told and expected because I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to do anything else. But I was never happy in the process. Occasionally I broke out. I refused to go to university at 18, I was completely unprepared emotionally for that experience and at some level I knew that. Instead, I went to work in London but that was never really me either. Until I re-discovered history and decided that I was going to study that at university instead of the Law degree I had refused to do at 18. I fit in with the subject, I loved it. I could immerse myself in the past and lose myself in my imagination of it and I excelled. From a personal perspective, I struggled to fit in. Not because of the age difference (being 5 years older than most), but because of my crippling insecurities and unresolved trauma plaguing me more while I was somewhere completely unfamiliar. I still tried to ‘behave’, to live to the rules imposed by my family at home despite them not fitting me. Though because I didn’t know who me was anymore, I was constantly conflicted.
This has gone on and on throughout my life. Contorting myself to fit into a box that others have made for me in an attempt to fit in because the real me wasn’t palatable to them. Smoking was a coping mechanism of suppressing that person. It was a layer of stress on me that I didn’t even realise I was carrying, sat upon layers of trauma and just general stresses of life. For example, I realise now that I have wanted to be pretty itinerant most of my life. I have wanted to travel – fiercely squashed by my mother as a ‘waste of time and money’ – and not conform to the ‘expected’ life of buying property, climbing the work ladder and getting married and having a family. But I got myself into the box the society around me expected me to be in, and it was a terribly uncomfortable fit. It still is. When I think about it, the very Victorian ideals I was expected to live up to were put upon me by my over-controlling mother. And because of what had happened with my birth father, I have spent the last 40-odd years conforming to her wishes in order to keep her happy. I never have, she has never been truly happy with any of my life choices because fundamentally, she isn’t happy. But that’s a whole other story, and the responsibility lies with me now for conforming.
So, I have suppressed many emotions over the years including the fact that, deep down, I am a free spirit who is desperately trying to get out. And a way of coping with that was smoking, and is now eating. How do I stop this spiral? Well, one of the things I have been doing has been to try and work out who is the real me? Who is this person because I know, I can feel, this barrier inside me that needs to be dissolved so I can finally let loose and be who I am. Always my subconscious trying to pull me back into being a ‘good’ girl (by rather Victorian standards as I say). One of the things I have always been is someone who does not like to be tied down, I don’t like things or people that are too attached to me. Too dependent. It makes me feel claustrophobic. I have put a different face to the world, but there are times when I feel like I want to scream with the sense that there is a dependency on me. It makes my flesh crawl. And yet, I can have pets and children quite happily. What makes me happy about them, though, is that they can move with me usually. There was a time, before I discovered online schooling and home education, that I felt constrained by staying in the same area for my son’s school. It literally felt like ants crawling under my skin when I thought about it. Now that I know there is an alternative, I can relax again.
I am also someone who is deeply spiritual. I am fervently not religious, but I am very spiritual and this is something I have hidden as well. I’ve not shown that side of myself to the world for fear of judgement and ridicule. I am, though, now at the stage of not caring what people think about this aspect of me. It is an integral part of me and has always been. I have at times grappled with what this has meant, the knowing about whether something is going to happen or not, the very vivid dreams I have, waking up to songs in my head that have real meaning to a situation and are a message, or waking up in the middle of the night because, for example, the word ‘simpatico’ was being shouted at me in my sleep and I knew I would forget it if I didn’t write it down somewhere. And not even knowing if it was a word at all, but having Googled it, it appears to be the word that sums me up in how I have lived my life. I am someone who has perhaps too much empathy to the point I know how people are feeling, and it can be too strong so I confuse it with something I am feeling. I’m learning now to separate the two, and meditation helps me a lot with that. The fact that I meditate is another point about me, I love that sense of moving into a different dimension and actually hearing your Higher Self speak to you. My mother told me the other day it was all ‘nonsense’ and ‘doesn’t work’ despite the fact that she has never tried it. She will say she has, but I know it isn’t something she would ever do knowingly. I just smiled and nodded, thinking how pointless it would be to defend meditation to her and what a shame it is that she will never get to know how amazing it is.
And I have learned that I am a writer. It is the thing that drives me, the way I get my message out. I’ve tried YouTube and found it distinctly uncomfortable. That might change, but right now it isn’t for me. No, I am most comfortable writing about what I’m thinking and how I am feeling, and finally getting all the stories that have run around my head out and down onto paper (metaphorically speaking, I don’t handwrite them anymore!). I may even be a bit of a romantic at heart, something I definitely never thought I was. I don’t like over-the-top romantic actions (a friend once came home from work to find her partner had lit candles leading to the dinner he had cooked for her, it made me throw up a bit in my mouth when she told me) and I know grand gestures would make me feel uncomfortable. But I think love is the most powerful, most wonderful emotion in the world though equally it is one we don’t understand enough or perhaps value to its truest extent. Again, a subject for another day. My romanticism is in someone listening to you and remembering the little details of what you love and who you are. Really taking the time to get to know you. That’s romantic for me.
This feels like one of the most self-indulgent blogs I’ve ever written, it’s all about me and light on any coaching support that others might be able to take from it. It equally doesn’t mention my books. And that does make me feel a bit uncomfortable, but it has been remarkably cathartic for me. So, I thank you for allowing me to indulge myself in this way. But if you were to take anything from this, perhaps you can take examining why you have self-destructive behaviours of any kind (if you do). It might have taken me 5 years nearly, a replacement self-destructive behaviour, and a blog post but I might be moving towards actually dealing with why I have these habits, which might help you too. And may even help you get there faster than me, I hope so anyway!
Louisa Simpson 