Still Smoking?!

Hurrah! Apparently the title language problem has been resolved!

Nine or ten years ago, in a 'conversation' with someone no longer in my life I was being somewhat contemptuously challenged about my cigarette smoking habit.

My challenger was a man who had smoked, by his own account from the age of thirteen until the age of thirty three when I, pregnant at the time, had asked him to join me in stopping. He had become, overnight, a zealous anti smoker.

Following the birth of my daughter within a few months I smoked a cigarette and a few years later when 'the shit hit the fan' as my marriage broke up (at my request and insistence) I took to smoking with an enthusiasm that mirrored that of my parents. I didn't approve of myself for it, indeed I had much to say to myself of the most damning variety about it, but I did it all the same for a few years. I've slowed down a lot now but I'm still doing it.

I assume you've guessed that the challenger was also the husband in the case.

Well. In response to his challenge back then I answered this: "The day you stop smoking up my life is the day I quite smoking cigarettes".

I have used this metaphor of comparing cigarette smoking favourably with bullshit and character defamation and so forth on several occasions since then.

Clearly this tactic of attack and defence has been a convenient excuse!

I continue to believe that fear and oppression and corruption kill more surely and quickly than does tobacco smoking and my own most cherished belief is that cancer is an extremely complex response of the body to psycho-social repressions and sufferings as well as the obvious strain the body is put under by being continually subjected to crap making its way into the lungs and oxygen getting such a poor look in and so forth. Indeed, I'm inclined to believe that it is a disease of such complexity that with our present frameworks of explanation we have no earthly chance of understanding it. I may of course be quite wrong since I got grade 3 in biology and I'm talking CSE, and I dropped physics and chemistry at 12 as a complete idiot in the subjects - if it didn't fizz or explode I really wasn't interested. I'm a lot more interested now of course :-)

All the same. Until I was nineteen and a half I had the lowest possible opinion of cigarette smoke. BOth my parents, indeed almost my entire family, long living all bar the uncle who pickled himself in snaps and expired at 43, were and are heavy smokers. Oh, I lie. My Mor-Far wasn't - he quit smoking at about 50 or so.. Anyhoo.. Throughout my later childhood and teenage years til the fateful moment I really found cigarette smoke obnoxious. Once I started college I used to come back from the pub to my beautifully smoke free bedsit smelling the ash all through my clothes and my hair. I was forever washing the stink away in time for another dousing the following day.

I was an art student and so the smoking culture was ubiquitous in every sense. And as an art student I was a weirdo. Having been to an all girls school I was shy of boys unless I could somehow desexualise the situation which, obviously, I did immediately. I arrived armed with my commitment to non attachment via Buddhist ideas and dressed in shrouds of calvinist self denial viz colour, beauty or pleasure at all. I practiced yoga instead of laughter, beansprouts instead of beer and marxism instead of boys. I worked with a group of four lads on a subversive little mag called 'Issue' linked with a self important albeit interesting and lively bunch of artists called Art-Language. I was not fitting in socially, though my typing skills came in handy.

One evening just near Christmas one of these boys invited me to try a cigarette and challenged my right to know I didn't want to smoke if I'd never tried the pleasure. Both dared and exhorted to prove I was not a prig I hesitated then accepted the invite. I don't actually remember the experience much apart from noticing that I didn't enjoy it. Nonetheless some junction between 'fitting in compromise' and 'food replacement option' fell into place instantly. Twenty-four hours later I was standing at the bar of the pub across the road buying myself 'ten of the very very weakest cigarettes you have, please'.

I've been a smoker ever since. I have had times of not smoking - two pregnancies and two lots of six months quit efforts since, and for five years extremely little and always furtive smoking while my children were very small. In the last eight years I have been unrepentently puffing away day and night quite often, though over the last seven months I have reduced my intake on and off.

NOW FOR THE ANNOUNCEMENT : I, CLAM, WILL BE QUITTING SMOKING CIGARETTES ON WEDNESDAY 11TH MARCH 2009.

ON TUESDAY 10TH MARCH I SHALL EAT PANCAKES TO MARK THE OCCASION.

ON WEDNESDAY 11TH MARCH I SHALL ANNOUNCE THAT THE ERA OF MY LIFE BEING SMOKED UP HAS NOW PASSED. I SHALL HAVE A POLITE BUT CLEAR AND ASSERTIVE WORD WITH ANYONE IN FUTURE WHO CHOOSES TO DEFAME ME, MISREPRESENT ME, FRIGHTEN ME (DOES THAT MEAN THE SAME THING), OR UNDERMINE ME.

Whoopsy daisy :-0 - I do believe I have just been guilty of some degree of leaked anger and that I have just delivered something of an ultimatum! Relax and remember that my references at the beginning of this posting will alert you to the somewhat specific basis for needing to make such an announcement. I should add that mental health service provision in my local area proceeded unwittingly to oblige the referred to no longer husband most co-operatively and pleasingly to his purposes by engaging in processes of 'assessment' 'diagnosis' and 'treatment' and 'after care' that fully constitute misrepresentation, defamation, threat and undermining. More of this elsewhere at some other time. This blog is about recovering from mental health issues and abrasions, not about psychiatry's impending denouement... ;-)

Well, ANYHOO to get to the point, yes dear reader that's how far we've now come, I thank you for being so patient; Yesterday I visited the quit smoking nurse and I came away with a prescription for an inhalator. Next Wednesday, it turns out, is National Non-Smoking Day. To celebrate that day I shall not smoke nicotine and shall provide a small but memorable demonstration in favour of clarity in life as a step on my journey to blow all the cobwebs away !

Those of you who know me don't look for an invitation, I have no idea what I shall be doing by way of said demonstration but you may be assured that if you don't witness it for yourselves it will nonetheless be undertaken as much in honour of your good selves as in honour of National Non Smoking Day and I.

Come along now, sign up sign up for calamity jane, get yourself down as a follower: miss-miracle has but one purpose in view in start up utterly selfish, to feel some support in her travels to wave her on. But in essence her mission is the mirror of you - you're a part of her and she's a part of you. We're all little facets of the diamond of life and if we help each other to shine what a startlingly shiny diamond we shall be.