A Commonplace Book

Of course, I’m glad I quit smoking, and I miss it like hell. These two states of mind cannot be mutually exclusive, I’ve discovered, when kicking an addiction. I can’t be all Pollyanna about quitting smoking and still continue to choose to live smoke free every day. And believe me, still, 365 days later, it’s still a choice. For certain, some days pass when I don’t think about it at all, and on other days it seems that I think about smoking every minute of the day. I have to honor my struggle by acknowledging (usually out loud) that this not smoking thing is sometimes SUCKTASTIC. I watched High Fidelity last week, and John Cusac’s character was smoking in a restaurant…Ah, the good old days…

Anti-smokers and smoker-haters would remind me that smoking is disgusting and smelly, and yes it is both. Three things I don’t miss are the smell on my clothes and in my hair, cleaning up butts, and freezing my ass off to get my fix.

But here’s what I do miss about smoking. I miss the girl I was when I started. I was a smart, edgy girl in college, and I smoked as a way of being bad without REALLY being bad. I wore knee-high black boots (jeans tucked in, naturally) and black eyeliner. I drank cheap wine and cheaper beer and hung out at poetry readings. I loved this girl, and I clung to this image of myself for as long as I could.

As a parent, I became a sneaky smoker. Only a few people knew that I smoked, and I always hid outside to have a cigarette. This was fun. I think we all need to be a little bit bad sometimes, and sneaky smoking was how I took a break from all the self-induced pressure of being a great mom and a great teacher and a great person. Also, smoking separated me from the gossipy PTA mombots, and I loved that too. I’d call up Mrs. Lipsticky, light up a smoke, and go on about how these women were all so effed up or about how my family could be so ungrateful.

But here’s something else I discovered. I’m generally a nicer person as a non-smoker. I know this now. I look back at all of the things that used to annoy me, and they don’t bother me that much anymore. Maybe removing the constant craving for nicotine has mellowed me out a little. But I’m also more sensitive. When I used to get angry (and go smoke), I now get hurt (and sometimes go cry). This is a shift that I’m still trying to negotiate.

The poet William Stafford once said, “I have woven a parachute out of everything broken,” and these words give me hope that we can, in fact, make something from the broken parts that will save us. But it seems to me, that this change can’t come from a paternalistic governmental figure, but rather, from the bottom, from, as MLK Scholar Kirk Noden said at a local observance, from “Mrs. Jones on the corner.” We all know that Dr. King had a dream, but a little reported fact is that he also believed that one of the biggest threats to Civil Rights was the “white moderate.”

King said, “I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the [...] great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is [...] the white moderate is who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.”

Even today, although in a different context, it seems that the same may be said true. It may be the white moderates, who are desperately trying to hold on to what they have, who are fearful of change and of terrorism and of rising gas prices and of unemployment, who are, albeit accidentally, still the greatest stumbling block to Civil Rights–this time to the erosion of them. We cling so desperately to the status quo that we’ve squelched our own desire to fight for right and for justice, and then we fill the gaping holes in our psyches with food, drink, smokes, gossip, and cheap chinese goods from Wal-Mart.

And still, hope comes from some of the parachute weavers. Blue Girl provides a forum for thought-provoking discussion of all things related to current politics. Wren educates about some of the more under-the-radar political goings-on, and she does so with great depth of feeling. Christopher examines the Civil Rights discussions of current candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton with his trademark elegant understatement.

In my moments of governmental faithlessness, I’m reminded that there are so many of us who want to see our country and our people become whole, and that our numbers include award-winning authors, bright political writers, poets, scholars, teachers, clergy men and women, counselors, computer techs, janitors, homemakers, and yes, Mrs. Jones on the corner.

1. The passive-aggressive Preschool Teacher: This woman is a piece of work. (Seriously folks, I’m going to need a wagon to bring in all of the stuff this woman is demanding for the Christmas party tomorrow.) I don’t know why this pissed me off so much, but last week, she handed out rewards to the kids whose parents purchased products from the crappy and overpriced school fundraiser (btw–preschool costs $100 a month) as a thank you for supporting the school. She called these kids up one at a time in front of the class to receive their prizes, like some kind of preschool Oscar ceremony. I didn’t purchase any of these crappy and overpriced products, so Gwennie didn’t get this reward. And of course, because Gwennie is four, this was a problem. Now, I’ve volunteered in the preschool classroom, I’m a room mom, and I’ve participated in the other fundraisers. So where is my kid’s Oscar? I feel like the talented black actor who gets screwed by the academy year after year  (or like Johnny Depp). Ultimately, the reward was a little plastic Christmas cup, which I found at The Wal for a quarter, but still.

2. My mother-in-law: I’ll have the pleasure of seeing MIL at my sis-in-law’s Christmas bash on Saturday. So, the combination of my 12 years of anger at MIL (who I’ve diagnosed as a narcissist and a pathological liar), my current state of sleep deprivation, and the free-flowing alcohol at the party ought to make me even more vulgar and difficult than MIL already says I am.

3. Morty (taken from “morte”):  the squirrelchipmouse who comes into my attic whenever it rains (which it’s been doing here in NE Ohio for days) and keeps me awake with his scratching. So far, I’ve had the position that dealing with Morty is a boy job, and Reg has some experience with a famous Houdini cage trick involving a couple of raccoons. Reg did call Jerry the trapper and made an attempt to deal with Morty. This attempt, however, has proven unsuccessful, and I’m this close to getting the plastique and going all Caddyshack on the little fucker. And I won’t be sorry.

About a year ago, the Pharma giant Pfizer began aggressively marketing, mostly to doctors, its new smoking cessation drug, Chantix–just in time for those New Year’s resolutions. At the same time, my fabulous state of Ohio passed new public smoking legislation. It seemed to me that the time was right to quit. So I puffed my way through the holiday season. And then like many, many other people, a couple of weeks into the new year, I walked into my doctor’s office and said, “I want to try this new drug for quitting smoking.” My doctor eagerly wrote me a prescription. The nurses commented on this “wonderful new drug.” The first month of a three month prescription carried a $100+ price tag. “Well worth it,” they told me.

A friend had begun taking Chantix about a week before me. Together we marveled at how the drug made cigarettes completely unpleasurable, but at the same time, we knew that it must be a pretty strong drug to affect our brains that way. We were both having very vivid dreams.We both noticed that we started to feel edgy if we forgot to take our pills. Then, over the next couple of weeks, I started noticing increasing dizziness, to the point that I nearly fainted several times a day. I decided to wean off of Chantix.

I weaned off very, very slowly, gradually decreasing my dose of Chantix. By the fourth day without the drug, I couldn’t steady my hands. I couldn’t stop crying. I had never, not even in post-partum, had suicidal thoughts in my life. And while I never actually thought about harming myself, I was suddenly unable to see any reason to get out of bed, to bathe, to get off the couch. I tried meditation and yoga, B Complex and Magnesium. Nothing worked. I was so desperate, I began scanning my old personal phone books to see if I could remember anyone who might be able to get me some marijuana, no luck. When I stood in my kitchen with a bottle of wine and a corkscrew at 8:00 am because I needed to take the edge off, I knew I was in real trouble. I begged my doctor to see me.

I told the doctor that I thought I was withdrawing from the Chantix. He told me that it was probably the nicotine. I knew he was wrong because I had quit smoking three times before, twice when I was pregnant, and I had never experienced these kinds of physical and psychological symptoms. But I didn’t fight with my doctor because I needed him to prescribe me another drug. He prescribed Celexa (an SSRI), which I took for the next five months. When I went to my doctor to ask to be taken off of Celexa, he reminded me of my symptoms–the shaking and the crying. I insisted that I had been withdrawing from Chantix; I could tell he wasn’t really listening.

When my friend finished her three-month prescription of Chantix, she experienced similar withdrawal symptoms. Her experiences led me to begin searching online, and what I discovered were sites and threaded discussion pages full of the same kinds of Chantix withdrawal stories, stories from patients who were terrified by their suicidal thoughts, many of whom had already begun smoking again to cope with the Chantix withdrawal. And yet, Chantix commercials appeared on television with increasing frequency.

Then, a few months ago, former New Bohemian musician Carter Albrecht was accidentally shot by a neighbor during a possibly Chantix-induced psychotic episode. His girlfriend told police that they were both taking the drug to quit smoking, but his body was never tested for Chantix. 

Doctors seem hesitant to find fault with the drug, and they keep prescribing it, often without any warning about the possible psychological side effects. Pfizer has responded by altering it’s drug warning information in Chantix packages, but in general, mainstream media has been largely silent on the possible dangers of Chantix.

While it’s true that quitting smoking is probably the best thing a person can do, healthwise, we have to be more understanding with and patient of smokers. I know that there isn’t one person who ever tried that first cigarette because she wanted to be a life-long smoker. Nicotine is a powerfully addictive drug, and yes, we’ve known this for a while, but most of us started smoking during those adolescent years when it is normal and natural not to worry about our health or our mortality.

All of the social stigma (packaged and repackaged for us by our media) connected with smoking has made smokers desperate to quit. The same stigma has made smokers the target of constant judgement and commentary by family, friends, and strangers. While I fully support outdoor-only smoking (for the health and safety of all), I also believe we need to back off of smokers a little so that we don’t send them running in search of a “miracle drug” like Chantix that may affect them psychologically in ways that we won’t know about for years. Smoking may be an unhealthy habit, but it isn’t a character flaw. It’s also not demonstrative of a lack of morality, although, perhaps, promoting a potentially dangerous psychotropic drug is.