When the addiction is over

Ever since I quit smoking, I think about my 7th grade health teacher often. More specifically, I think about the day she said this in class:

“Nicotine is still found to cause mental withdrawal symptoms even after 7 months”. 

I can still recall her matching colored tracksuits, her loud voice that she projected to the class, her ridiculously red face that managed to get redder every time she had a point to illustrate. I could never seem to forget her intimidating demeanor, or her thinly drawn on eyebrows. 

A child's mind in the eyes of addiction are two worlds that collide in a way I find puzzling. I’m puzzled because even as an adult I think that I’m still nothing but a child, because for some reason, I take Ms. Morra's baseless statement like it's gospel, and I barely even knew her. 

Around the time when my addiction was at its all-time low, a character in a book I was reading said something that followed me for years. It was in response to her husband that asked her if she could quit, she said:

“Haven’t you heard that saying? Smoking isn’t something you quit, it’s something you resist for the rest of your life?”

Mine and the husbands' response differed. While he shrugged and asked for the smoking to be in moderation, I stopped reading the story entirely. I’m not entirely sure why I gravitated more towards the theatrics in Ms. Morra’s statement. I guess there was a level of belief that was disingenuous, something that could politely keep me in check in order to not relapse. Or rather, it could be because her claim had an end to it. What that character said scared me, and I actively ignored it because of its bottomless pit of a saying. It felt all too real, and when things are too aggressive I tend to shut down, and what that character said essentially dug me into the ground. I knew it was true, because in the midst of resisting, everything about me has changed. I’m less easy-going in social settings, I can’t go to movie theaters all that much anymore, I need to play my favorite songs in the car when I’m driving. I’ve cut my caffeine intake completely in half, and arguably the worst of all: I’ve gone three sizes up. 

I haven’t touched a cigarette in 5 months, and so far I’ve picked up painting and the piano. I focus on hobbies that heavily rely on my hands. I picked up crochet for when I watch TV, so that I don’t chew my nail beds off because I’m so used to hand to mouth interactions that I can no longer sit still. When the inside of my mouth hurts from mindlessly sucking on it, I stick a lollipop in my mouth. These things keep me afloat, and I refuse to exhaust myself of my options. I don’t let myself get there, I’ll go through every single flavor of Trident gum and fill my stomach with gallons of cold water, boba, and smarties before I let that happen.

I tell myself a lot that these are just the things I have to do. I hold onto what my health teacher said in hopes that in two months I will be free. There’s a delusion in that hope and I know it isn’t right or healthy and that I’m digging myself into a hole, but it’s the only thing to do. 

No one gives fucking instruction manuals on this. 

Since I stopped smoking, I noticed that I can go up three flights of stairs without panting, I don’t see stars every time I get up quickly, I have so much energy, I’m more mobile, and I can freely run and no longer spend the next 30 minutes trying not to vomit from how winded I am. I can enjoy my mother's cooking once more, and no longer fight God trying to swallow. I can dance for longer at clubs, I no longer feel nauseous when I’m drunk, water feels refreshing, and being alive exponentially feels better. I'm no longer hit with a wave of anxiety once I wake up, which has been nice, because now I can roll around in bed with my partner with no anxious thoughts or feelings. 

Back when I initially had quit, I wished that I could bottle up that sting of anxiety that erupts in my heart when I would remember that I can’t smoke anymore, make a Molotov cocktail out of it, and throw it at my heart of hearts that decided to quit in the first place. I’ve begun to quiet that thought in my head, but it still finds its way to slither into my thoughts when I’m met with any slight frustration or obstacle that becomes a crying session. Progress is progress. 

Addiction is so incredibly heinous, especially when the addiction is over. Getting through the first month, there’s an exhilaration; a sense of pride in yourself for making it this long. Congratulations to you! No one talks about months later, though, when that sense of pride is gone, and no one cares anymore. When you’re just a bitch that cries a lot, complaining about how nothing hits the spot anymore when you need it to. It feels like you’ve finally found a way out of the woods, only to enter the mouth of the beast. I’ve grown to become friends with this beast, I feed her treats and I scratch her behind the ears. I’m hoping that one day she will let me exit from her mouth again and not her rear end. 

After all of this, I will tell you what I’ve realized: I am an addict, and because I am an addict, I will spend the rest of my life forming addictions to other things in order to ignore what I actually want. That has been one difficult thing to tackle, to know that what I want, I will never have again for the sake of my own happiness in life. For the sake of my own happiness, I have to promise to myself to no longer crave the one thing I want every day. So, I’ll addict myself to melodies, to TV shows, actors, colors, scents, foods, clothes. I’ve made my peace with the fact that this is just how my life will be now, and I will never be younger than I am in this second, and that I can no longer ignore harmful actions. I’ll never be the carefree self that had the time to form an addiction and not care about the after, because I am now the after. 

I continue on with this weird sense of loss I feel deep down in my chest. 

My clarity is knowing that I will never find it.

I think that I will spend the rest of my life ignoring the pit in my stomach that began churning the one time I tried to rewatch Shameless, or after I’ve had a delicious, warm meal that fills my belly, or after I’ve had sex, and I glance at my bedside table to no longer see what once was on it. It feels like the odorless roadkill that follows me around wherever I go now, it will always be the itch I can’t scratch, the ghost that taunts me because I will always know how to make it go away.

There’s one last memory that pops up into my head at the end of the day, and that’s of my elementary school health teacher. One day during class, she brought this jar with her. It was filled with this thick, black liquid, and floating around it were torn up cigarettes.

“This is what your lungs will look like just after one cigarette.” 

She passed it around the classroom, and when it finally reached me, I remembered staring at the pieces of tobacco that sat at the bottom with a deep sense of disturbance. I shook it, as if it were a snow globe, and watched the tobacco and orange filters fall like snow. I know now that it was a concoction of maple syrup with black food dye and a 7 dollar pack of cigarettes that she tore up. I’m filled with the same sense of disturbance I felt when I was a child, although now it’s disturbance from the waste of cigarettes, but I digress.

I’m filled with a weird sense of peace when I think about her, and when I think about her, thoughts in my head float around like those pieces of tobacco. I wonder what she’s up to now, and where she went. That same year, we suddenly got a new health teacher. The word around the school was that Ms. Fitzgerald was fired because a student found her outside in the parking lot smoking a cigarette, and that always led me into my next thought:

I wonder what brand she smoked.