Our vocabulary for addiction and personal change or development is so limited. It’s so simplistic and juvenile, and it’s somehow self-evident to me that if we improve the way we talk about these things, we improve the way we deal with them.
I think that’s because the inverse seems to be true- the more simplistically you talk about something- the more bluntly, the more we overgeneralize, the likelier we are to get things wrong. And we get things wrong in a very broad, blunt way. When we’re precise, we still get things wrong- in fact we can sometimes get things very, very wrong. But then we learn. This isn’t the case for broader strokes- we’re “somewhat in the ballpark”, and that’s “okay”. So there seems to me to be a relationship between the way we talk about something and the way we deal with it.
To be more precise- there’s a relationship between the way we talk and the way we think, and there’s another relationship between the way we think and the way we act. Ultimately we just want to improve the way we act, so we’re all better off, in whatever sense we want that to mean.
Anyway. I want to talk about cigarettes for a while. I’ve talked about them many times before, and I overdramatize them, but this is my blog and I want to talk about them so I’m going to talk about them. And let me illustrate the original point with a statement: It’s been about a week since my last cigarette.
That statement by itself doesn’t actually tell you very much. Am I trying to quit, or not? Was I a heavy smoker prior to that, or not? Most people won’t even really ask these questions- but then and again, to be fair, most people don’t really care. Other smokers or ex-smokers or on-again-off-again smokers might be interested, but even then that’s probably rooted in self-interest- we want to know how others are doing so that we can figure out “where we stand”. It’s insidious, how much we care about these things.
Erm… I realize that you can’t interrupt a word vomit. You have to go from start to finish. There’s a certain rhythm to it that you can’t mess up. The dots connect in a certain way, and then you have to follow the path. The path is set up semi-nicely, but it’s also temporary, and if you don’t start running on it immediately to light it up, it fades away, and you’ll forget what you were getting at, what you were going for, and you’re left with this sad and sorry memory of something that could’ve been.
It’ll be somewhat interesting to read my vomits on hindsight and see where they go. Anyway, I’m going to use the distraction as fuel- I got on Facebook and started scrolling back to see what I’ve done that was well-liked, well-responded to. I have a blogpost in me that I’m saving up called confessions of an ex-facebook addict. Or something like that. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
I’ve said that there are certain similarities between cigarette addiction and Facebook, and games- all of them are games in a certain way, and Facebook is a lot about identity creation- you want to find out who you are, in the context of the people of your life. I caught myself scrolling back through my old status updates and shares to see what people respond to- because in a small way people are a representation of reality, of “the market”, of “nature”. It’s like doing comedy- you might find all of your own jokes funny, but you also want to see what people laugh at. (Reminder: Louis CK’s description of what he did to be like George Carlin is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen, and it’s very compelling and it speaks to me as a creator of some sort. That’s how you create- you have to discard. You have to kill your babies. It’s way, way harder than it sounds.)
Ermm…. shall I get back to smoking? I wanted to think of a dramatic way to say this but I’ll just lay out the facts in a boring way- I started fooling around with cigarettes at the end of 2006, early 2007, became a full on smoker around mid 2007, really really serious by 2008… I loved them, they meant something to me- they kept me company, they understood me, they let me express myself, they let me be me, blah blah. I happily smoked throughout 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012…. thousands of cigarettes (500 packs is 1,000). Thousands and thousands. I attempted to quit three or four times, and never really went more than three or four days- usually when I was really, really sick. (You don’t enjoy cigarettes when you’re horribly sick, so you might as well just not smoke- and at the end of the illness you’ve been smoke free for 4 or 5 days, so you might as well keep going. Some people might pull this off, but I think it’s not a sustainable strategy- one that’s likely to hit failure.)
To quit smoking you need to go into a very different place and build failsafes that’ll keep you there- the simplest version of this is a completely different way of looking at yourself, at cigarettes, at life and the world- but easy for me to say all this, I’ve never quit smoking. What makes me confident that I can, though, is that I quit Facebook (for about 3 months, fine), and going back to it makes me feel like it’s never going to be the same again, and that I’m going to have to leave forever. I’ve also broken ties with some really close friends- and ultimately that’s what quitting smoking is going to be like, leaving an abusive relationship. And that’s much easier said than done, because abusive relationships are never 100% bad. In fact that 50% or less of good in the relationship is going to look better than most of the shitty good in the rest of the world.
Not happy with this vomit, but I’m just going to ship it and start another one. Why? I don’t know, I just feel like it.