A Conversation About Alcohol and Cigarettes

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My first cigarette was amazing!  I liked to get stoned, binge drink alcohol, and I got a huge head rush from my first smoke.  I broke the filter off the second cigarette, inhaled deeply, and looked up into the clear blue sky framed by the trees of the suburban yard.  Cigarettes were so cheap, just one tossed me for a spin, and I was nineteen years old.  

Twenty-six years have passed since I had my first cigarette.  Twenty-eight years have passed since the first time I vomited from binge drinking. Twenty-seven years elapsed after my first hit of marijuana.  For thirty years, my most consistent habits included journaling, alcohol, and smoking cigarettes.  Wading across water with a backpack, sitting alone in a bar with a pen, emoting imagined love, scribbling incoherently, and misspellings are all present throughout the innumerable pages inscribed over the years.  I relished smoking and rewarding myself with over-consumption and writing; I felt as though the drugs gave me the breath to emote the full breadth of the emotions swirling around me at the time.  Unless specifically noted, the drugs refer to cigarettes, alcohol, and modest THC.  

I am not your typical 45-year-old man, unless it is normal to have most of your friends live between 300 and thousands of miles away.  A career never became my motus operandi.  I remain unmarried.  A vasectomy was my 41st birthday present to myself.  I have not finished many projects that were promising and blindly pursued others that never amounted to much.  Overall, I have been a lucky guy given all the potential downsides to this life lived.  I drank for success and anger and despair....I found small successes in the ocean of anger and despair...I drank often.

To make a long story palatable, the same point will not be made over and over ad infinitum.  However, this conversation will send us on tangents, visit different perspectives, offer readers incalculable escapes into material that is truly relevant to their questions, and hopefully give readers enough knowledge to understand the answers sought.  I have immense gratitude for so many influencers throughout my life, and over the years, my outlook on life has changed with seasons…yet, sobriety from alcohol and nicotine has inculcated the most significant positive course changes.  

My life has taught me there are many more people that are smarter, harder working, suffering greater injustices, more resilient, endured sincere trauma, et cetera.  From a Recovery perspective, other people’s stories provide context for the paths that we are on as nonusers, abusers, and in-betweeners.  “We come here to get gold nuggets of truth that make sense to us”, said a frequenter of the local secular Alcoholic’s Anonymous chapter.  His truism stuck and is part of my longer answer to the question, “How do you do it?”  “It” is a process first and foremost.  It has a timeline of successes rather than a finite set of steps with a metaphorical graduation and diploma.  My brother, a successful quitter of his zest for alcohol, would tell anyone that asks, “everyone does it differently and there is no secret recipe for quitting alcoholism.”  

I certainly thought that getting wasted with friends every weekend was normal, but I also was susceptible to getting drunk mid-week or whenever someone wanted to get drunk with me.  Was I self-medicating every time I drank 6 or more beers in a couple hours, had multiple shots of hard liquor in thirty minutes or less, smoked a carton of cigarettes in a week, or inhaled an eighth of marijuana in short order?  Did using drugs like cocaine, LSD, psilocybin, or ecstasy mean that I had unresolved emotional issues needing therapy?  Did a fear of heroin’s potential to become addictive and ruinous make me aware of my other addictions?  The answers are not clear to me now; I believe that these answers will be evident to me years from now with a long stretch of 20/20 hindsight.    Nonetheless, I can make convincing arguments to support the real and perceived benefits of not drinking and smoking.  

The facts are the facts.  There is not one cardiologist, pulmonologist, hematologist, or psychologist that will advocate for binge drinking and pack-a-day smoking habits.  People will justify their cigarette addiction humorously as a means to filter the urban air.  I justified my worst spells with alcoholism as “normal” behavior given that there were always others around me drinking more; albeit, I was regularly drinking with very heavy-duty alcoholics.  Some people drink alone; I generally drank around others.  A long-standing rule for me was to not have alcohol at home, because I knew it would be polished off at the soonest opportunity and probably after already having at least a few elsewhere first.  

The most common question asked in online user groups is, “How did you stop drinking?”  From my experience, there are always people who will share their formulas.  The best answers address the journey, the commitment to sobriety, and treating the processes of abstaining, quitting, and smiling as a daily endeavors.  Reddit’s r/stopdrinking community has the tagline IWNDWYT (I Will Not Drink With You Today), which will appear as a closing for the lion’s share of replies to posts.  

Books are available with steps, methods, and other techniques to help those that desire sobriety.  There are many types of treatment facilities available that range from hospital wards, self-commitment centers, and out-patient services that are specific to the severity of the addictions that require these types of interventions.  

There are no shortage of websites, community-based groups, books, articles, and virtual groups that continue to help the addicted overcome their unhealthy habits.  I tried a variety of community-based groups that were within easy reach of my home over the years, and my experience with them is positive.  The best-known organization is Alcoholics Anonymous, which was not my cup of tea.  The Blog chronicles moments of sobriety, what it means to me, explanations of addiction to respond to others' statements, and some musing. 

I recommend a website, a real journal, or online thing that allows you to chronicle your toughest days and whenever you need to think through the answer as you write about the moment.  One day, you will reread these entries and you will know exactly how you felt back then with your flashback language.  We find words and use specific metaphors when we are in extreme emotional states...the syntax, grammar, and vocabulary are unique to different emotional moments.