Love, Nicotine, and Caffeine

What is the hardest thing you've quit?

Love

To strive to “be” a writer is to accept a cascade of seemingly impossible challenges that will feel personal and customized to torture you.

For me, the hardest thing to quit was my desire to publish traditionally. I can still visualize my debut novel on the shelf at Powells with the FSG stamp on the spine. I thought something along the lines of Denis Johnson’s Nobody Move would look perfect.

A fantastic novel published by FSG

Nicotine

In 1998, at the age of twelve, I first lit a cigarette. The first one tasted so bad, I stubbed it out and ran away, certain I’d never smoke again.

Two weeks later I gave it a second shot, and the moment I inhaled, I’d sparked addiction, sensuality, and love. For six years, I begged, borrowed, and stole to feed my cravings.

At age eighteen, I walked into my first gas station where I could legally buy smokes, and felt the thrill of being a smelly adult. Cigarettes were my secret, truest self. I hid my habit, as best I could, from my parents, my grandparents, my classmates, even my coworkers.

I trusted only a few people with the truth about my addiction, and this gave meaning and value to my behavior.

In 2013, as a husband and father, I decided to try quitting coffin nails, as we called them, switching instead to vaping. By 2019, I’d quit vaping and was, by everyone’s definition, a nonsmoker.

I still miss cigarettes today. Quitting was easy enough, but staying quit has taken a great deal of discipline and commitment.

Perhaps it’s the staying quit that gives me courage to keep writing, marketing my writing in the face of rejection, and challenging myself.

There’s this term in AA—yes, I’ve been there too—if you quit the action, but don’t change you behavior, you’re nothing more than a dry drunk. Some days, I think the dry part is the part that matters.

I lean into the craving, the addiction, the sensuality to do unpleasant things, and I remember that nothing can be as bad as the nicotine-trembling when you’re thirty-six hours from your last cigarette.

Thirty-six hours since my last cigarette happened perhaps one hundred ninety-three times before I left tobacco behind for the long haul. I’ve lately considered Nicorette as a focus stimulant, but there’s the whole slippery slope consideration.

Whatever the case, I cannot quit my pursuit of publication and mass distribution, and neither should you. It’s in no one’s best interest to give up—unless you hate what you do—in which case, quitting is sane, and I recommend it.

Caffeine

While I am aware of a handful of people who have quit caffeine, you will never find me even contemplating such a thing. Caffeine is as nearly part of my life as blood and water.

Writing, reading, caffeine, Ashley, blood, and water.