“You stupid fool” I think as I see a woman walking down Grange Road, smoking a cigarette. It’s my first ‘you stupid fool’ moment of this give-up. I always feel the same way about five or six days into an attempt to stop smoking, once the worst of the cravings have gone, once the edgy cold turkey symptoms have started - slowly - being replaced by the benefits of not ingesting daily doses of tar, nicotine and cyanide through the lungs. Like being able to breathe properly. Like not coughing out a chestful of phlegm whenever called upon to move anything quicker than walking pace. Like not stinking of stale tobacco all the time. Like realising you are spending between five and ten quid less every day.
It’s a dangerous period, the ‘you stupid fool’ period, because like many aspects of coping with addiction, it is delusional. On one level, what I am thinking is: ‘aren’t you glad you’re not like her any more?’ What I suspect is lurking underneath is: ‘the bitch. Why can’t I do that, too?’
The subconscious plays funny tricks on you. Why is it that the conversation keeps turning to cigarettes? Why is it that the first post-quit movie I watched was ‘The Big Sleep’ with Humphrey Bogart in the Philip Marlowe role? Why do I keep getting mental images of the inside of Catlin’s?
I’m good at giving up, I used to joke. I’ve done it a thousand times. But actually that isn’t far off the truth. I have given up so many times, and given up giving up after so many differing periods of abstinence (from twenty minutes to two years) that I’ve become quite an expert on the subject. The ‘you stupid fool’ period often precedes the drunk-in-a-pub ‘oh hell I’ll just have one’ moment. Which I know, now, to be extra wary of. Because it inevitably leads, a few days down the line, to smoking again whenever possible, even - no, especially - while walking down the street. AL