I do everything a reasonable person is supposed to do.
I meditate. I do breathwork. I show up at my weekly therapy appointments, even when I would rather sleep in. I take the SSRIs that my therapist, my former primary care physician, and I all agree I should take. I work out several days a week. I go for a walk every evening before dinner. And, despite applying for hundreds of jobs, I’ve been out of work for a year. The stress of being without a stable income and benefits has affected my well-being on a cellular level, and the protocols that are supposed to work do not—even though, by every measure of wellness culture, I am taking my own care seriously. Before I left D.C. to move in with friends in North Carolina, I spent every day on edge, wondering when someone would unlock the door and force me and my possessions out onto the curb.
I do everything a reasonable person is supposed to do. And now, for the first time in a decade, I want a cigarette. To get even more specific, I would kill for a Marlboro 27.
Cigarettes are the leading cause of preventable deaths in the U.S. While the long-term health effects of the occasional cig are tricky to track, we do know smoking even just one causes immediate damage to the body, and, of course, you run the risk of developing a really nasty habit. Despite this, they are having a cultural resurgence, and many writers have spent the last few months parsing out why. In The Cut, Xochitl Gonzalez made a melancholy case for smoking as a rebellion against the productivity-poisoned way we live now, a way of stepping outside our optimized matrix and engaging with another person for the length of a cigarette. In Allure, Gabriella Onessimo followed the smoking aesthetic into the makeup aisle, rightly clocking that the beauty industry is glamorizing a deadly addiction.
At my peak, I smoked half a pack on a mild day, though most were bad ones where I would have nearly the whole 20. When I quit, the effects were immediately noticeable. Within weeks, my skin was better, my resting heart rate was going down, and I could take deeper breaths. Quitting was one of the few unambiguously good decisions I have ever made about my own health, and I do not regret it. Still, the desire to smoke pops up. Most likely because addiction, even one I had a long time ago, has rewired the neural pathways in my brain a bit, but also there’s the intense stress I find myself under.
