Confessions of a Closet Smoker
Foreword
What follows is my account of an attempt to end a 30-year-old nicotine addiction. If you found this site by chance, welcome. I hope this might help you do the same. If you came here because of a posting in quitnet.com, you are especially welcome. The site originated as a substitute obsession for the author's amusement, and continues with that primary purpose.
Much has happened since I wrote most of these pages. I have fallen by the wayside more than once. Sometimes these were brief trangressions, and other times I entered lengthy remissions. Right now, I'm on a 32-month quit. I hope this will be my last, and think it will. Some day, I will write about this current quit, which has worked much better than the quit described here.
The site was deleted by a server, and sat on my computer as a set of inactive files for quite a while. I am just now getting it started up again, and I know there will be quite a few broken links. Please forgive them, and if you get a chance, let me know about them.
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This is dedicated with affection and many thanks to all the intrepid quitsters at quitnet.com, especially those quoted here. They have made all the difference.
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How to Become a Closet Smoker
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Are there lots of other closet smokers? Who can tell, really? I have always been hiding this smoking habit from someone. I began in college with a pipe. I was open about this, because, after all, I was doing it for the image. However, I did try to hide it from my parents and relatives, because smoking is one of the family taboos. In retrospect, I can't imagine that I succeeded in hiding the pipe smoking, but virtually all of my college friends smoked, including my roommates. I may have succeeded in palming off the blame for smoky odors on my friends. I had no difficulty doing without it during the summers of those years.
The pipe smoking intensified during graduate school, and the addiction to nicotine probably set in during that period. It was as a graduate student that I began to do some real work and experience some real pressure. The pipe became a useful crutch to me, particularly during an extended period apart from my wife, who left for law school during my fourth year of graduate school, and during the subsequent year, when I joined her in Ohio and worked on the dissertation in our apartment. I succeeded in giving it up after I defended my Ph.D. dissertation, for maybe a two week period-- until recently, the longest nicotine-free period since the mid-70's for me.
A major lesson for me is that external events, major achievements, life style changes, or other people's wishes have never been enough to make me quit smoking. No real progress is possible unless you really, |
really,
really
want to quit, and unless you will tolerate no excuses from yourself.
| Excuses, more excuses, and even more, real good excuses.
The stresses became intense upon finishing the degree. I had limited geographical flexibility for my job hunt (my wife still had a year to go when I finished my Ph.D.). I was competing in a market of more than 200 applicants for every advertised academic job in my field. And my wife, having endured the hardships of being a graduate student's wife, expected me to start carrying my weight. I took a job as a night desk clerk at a downtown hotel. This was a good lesson in humility for an arrogant new Ph.D., which I have found useful to relate to whining graduate students worrying about their employment. However, night shifts with smoking coworkers and days alone at home looking through want ads (and playing the Jumble-- I'm really good at it) were the perfect environment for me to develop a cigarette habit. I tried to conceal this from my wife; although she suspected it all along, I think I did succeed in convincing her that I was only smoking occasionally.
The pressures became even more intense after I found more meaningful employment, first teaching in a temporary position at a 2-year regional campus of a large midwestern univerity, then as a research fellow at a fancy-dancy ivy league university. The job market was tough, and I had to produce. I did manage to get a lot done, all the while becoming more and more attached to cigarettes. I was sure I would be able to quit as soon as I got a secure position.
Despite a worsening market, a tenure-track position came through, and I was sure I'd be able to quit smoking as soon as I became established and secure. During the interview, the university seemed like a placid little place without a lot of pressure, although there were more than 300 applicants-- the same 300 who applied for the other 20-30 tenure track academic jobs in my field that year. It turned out to be quite different from placid: the administration was unstable, the department was always under political attack, and threats to my job became almost routine. I found myself fighting to justify my existence at each of two semiannual reappointment reviews, and defending myself in an outlandishly hostile tenure review, although I had published 10 papers and obtained over $300,000 in grants, in a field where 1/3 of that would be considered very good. Meanwhile, my wife was having no easier a time of it in a legal career, had abandoned her second job with a firm in another city, and we had moved back where she would try to start her own practice while trying to get pregnant. My smoking was not a high priority issue, but I was very careful to keep it private. After all, it was only a temporary condition that I would get rid of when the climate was right.
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More excuses.
So it continued. Tenure was won, but in the process I became so intensely competitive that I had to keep pushing. After an encounter with my wife over the problem, I agreed to go to a counsellor who specialized in smoking cessation. I lied a lot, and convinced (?) both the counsellor and my wife that I had given it up. My actual failure in doing so boxed me further into the closet. Surely, I'd be able to quit after being promoted to full professor, or after we succeeded in having kids. The in-laws retired from their careers in the midwest and moved in up the street. I was being invaded. The kids didn't come: one miscarriage, and years of effort later, we decided to adopt. We chose Albania, an obscure basket case of a country in the Balkans. Surely, I could use this as a quitting event. Not so. The hotel was so filled with smoke that there was no concern about being suspected, and there were lots of little errands I could run while my wife ran others in getting the paperwork in order. And cigarettes were amazingly cheap without government taxes, not to mention the anxieties of being in a truly bizarre little communist place, awash with armed and smoking soldiers, with a highly unpredictable adoption process plagued by policies that shifted daily as the government tried to figure out how to work in the absence of their 50-year dictator. On our return, the rush of well-wishers and new parenthood produced a new set of stresses and anxieties, hardly conducive to quitting.
Still more, real good excuses.
And so it has gone in the six years since then. More reasons to feel guilty, more reasons not to quit. Increased success and major wins, including additional grants, promotion to full professor, and becoming department chairman, were hardly relieving stress. Neither did the murder of a close colleague by her drug addicted neighbor, or the nervous breakdown of one of our graduate students, who accused me of masterminding a plot to poison her office with fumes. There was always something stressful looming in the future that I could use to justify further smoking. Milestone birthdays came and went, each followed by a frustrated day-after restart. The same can be said for every New Year's Day that I can remember: that's the day I quit smoking every year, and also the day I have the year's first cigarette.
Throughout, I knew that I was physically capable of quitting. Every extended visit at my parents' house involved quitting, but those were limited stays (never more than a week) and the quitting was not a matter of choice. I was, after all, a closet smoker. Our few brief vacations fit into the same category, although I have usually found ways to sneak a smoke here and there during almost all of them. The psychological side of quitting has proven much more difficult, and I seem to be finally coming to grips with that.
Until recently, I was enslaved to the following pattern, highly ritualized. To reduce possibilities for detection, each of these smoking events was also accompanied by a thorough washing of the hands and face, and usually tooth-brushing.
| Morning (6): After breakfast, walk Scuppers (our springer spaniel) in the woods behind our house. Smoke 2 cigarettes. On the 20-minute drive to work, stop half-way for 2 more cigarettes. At about 10:30, sneak off somewhere on campus, often the parking garage, for a couple more. |
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Mid-day (4): Drive somewhere alone for lunch. In seclusion, have two pre-lunch and two post-lunch cigarettes.
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Afternoon (4): Arrange for a smoke break sometime in mid-afternoon, usually around 3:00. Stop on the way home for two more, usually about 5:30.
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Evening (4): Walk dog in woods after dinner, and again late in the evening. Each time, smoke two cigarettes. During times of stress, the dog sometimes got longer walks or more of them. The total consumed rarely exceeded 20, but was rarely less than 15.
Weekends were especially stressful for me. The main source of stress was finding enough opportunities to maintain my habit without discovery. There are ways, of course, including errands, dog-walking, sneaking smokes while left alone, and trips to the lab to do some research or to grade papers. While these things did get done, the primary motive was to smoke cigarettes.
Particularly vulnerable times for me have been while travelling alone, either for field work or professional meetings. This unregulated free time, in view of nobody but strangers, is especially dangerous for the closet smoker. Fortunately, I take relatively few such trips, maybe 4 per year, lasting at most a week at a time. If I were a travelling salesman, I am sure I would have developed a 2 or 3 pack a day habit.
