Holy Smokes: On Coming to Terms with My Shame Around Smoking
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Thanks for your patience! We typically publish on Mondays and Wednesdays, but we felt like this piece was worth waiting for. We think you will too.
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What goes into someone's mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them." Matthew 15:11
The first time I inhaled tobacco I was 15 years-old. I had been a staunch rule-follower up until then and smoking a cigar was something that was both rebellious and still technically legal. My reasons for doing so were not unique and erred on cliche: it looked cool. And the idea of looking cool consumed me, so much so that when the opportunity presented itself during a road trip on a Christian retreat, I took it. What cooler place for experimentation than behind a McDonald’s parking lot? What cooler company than three high school boys I had no intention of befriending? The cigar was grape-flavored and came in a shiny plastic wrapper. I don’t recall looking cool nor do I recall how it made me feel. I only remember being overcome with shame afterwards as I vigorously chewed Stride 5 gum and doused my clothes in Old Spice body spray.
The last time I smoked was over two weeks ago—I had one Marlboro gold. It was lightly raining outside and I felt like I needed to create some headspace. My reason for smoking now is that it's an excuse to be doing something while doing nothing. The time it takes to burn is the perfect amount of time to mull over an idea or some kind of worry. It can keep the tempo of a long, spirited philosophical conversation or do all the talking when the only thing you can manage is the beginning and ending of a short, difficult thought. And every now and then, you inhale deep enough that time seems to stop. It’s as if the fog in your brain clears out and you remember what it’s like to be in your body again.
I also know that smoking is very, very bad for me. At the time of publishing, nearly three million people have lost their lives at the hands of the coronavirus. Sit with that. Now sit with the fact that over twice that number of people in the world lose their lives every year in their own hands and between their fingers, to smoking.
My grandfather Henry took up smoking when he went to serve as a medic in World War II. I never had the chance to meet him but I was told that he was soft-spoken, gentle, and liked to smoke Camels. By WWII, researchers had known for almost two decades that smoking was connected to lung cancer. But newspaper editors - many of whom were bolstered up by tobacco companies’ advertising money - were sheepish to publish such findings until about ten years later. I write all of this to say that my grandfather Henry didn’t die on the beaches of Normandy. He died of a heart attack at the age of 61, smoking his filtered Camels.
I write all of this to say that I know better. I recall my fourth-grade science class when they (it’s always a “they” when you’re young) brought in a non-smoker’s lung, pink and spongy and full of life, and compared it to the gray, corroded, Swiss cheese lump that was a smoker’s lung. I remember Julia, one of my classmates, left the classroom bawling because her mother smoked and she loved her mother dearly and couldn’t understand why she would gravitate towards something that would eventually destroy her body. I’ve since wondered the same thing about myself.
I’ve put ages and deadlines and months to when this action verb—smoking—would no longer be a part of my life, that its feeling would no longer be one that I desired. If we’re being honest, I always hoped that my lungs would stay pink and spongy enough to show to a bunch of fourth-graders.
I wonder what my nine year-old self would think of me now? Would he also cry outside in the hallway next to Julia? Would he understand that partaking in self-destructive behavior is a way of coping with all the other ways that life seems to pummel us? Would he hate the sin and love the sinner? Would he hate the sinner for sinning?
I’m reminded of a quote from Malcolm X, which comes from a speech he delivered in 1962 while addressing a congregation of people who were grieving the death of a Korean War veteran named Ronald Stokes. Stokes was shot in the back by police during a raid on a Los Angeles mosque. The quote goes: "Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet?"
I think about this question often because it begs an answer. There’s something inside of me that hates myself whenever I smoke. Not the healthy side or even the moral side. It’s the shameful side. Uncritical, judgmental, self-deprecating shame taught me to hate myself. Perhaps it’s the all-too familiar voice that we all hear when we return to a thing that we know isn’t good for us even though something about that thing can also be good to us. The world can be so cruel sometimes and it’s this cruelty that causes people like me to look for ways to tamp it down, if only for a few minutes.
I wouldn’t say that I suffer from nicotine addiction, which is a chronic disease, but I also know that smoking anything for half of your life is bound to change something about your body. What I would say that I suffer from is contradiction. Before I’m a smoker, I’m a runner. And running for me, like smoking, is about a chase. A chase for that feeling when you slip further into your body and outside of your mind at the same time. To be doing something and nothing.
But running like smoking is also about not achieving that feeling, especially when your legs feel like lead and your head cloudy and your breathing stilted. You return home sweaty and unfulfilled. Reeking of smoke and tasting like burnt cotton, unfulfilled. The obvious difference between smoking and running though, is that whenever you run (or walk for that matter), your body thanks you. Your mind thanks you and the earth thanks you. On the contrary, when you light butane to burn a dried out tobacco leaf that has been processed with hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde, lead, arsenic, and ammonia, only Phillip Morris thanks you.
This is not meant to be a PSA about the dangers of tobacco use. Have you ever seen a tobacco plant? Its leaves look like the ears of some giant-horned mammal and if you didn't know to look, you'd think that it just wanted what we all want, to grow tall and blow in the wind. And in some indigenous communities in the Americas, the consumption of tobacco through inhalation, smoking, or ingestion is used in sacred rituals as a way of cleansing, purging, or even praying.
Perhaps what I’m getting at here is that in my experience, it’s not the smoke itself that’s the problem. It’s where the smoke leaves me, which is often filled with more shame and regret. In a series of lessons about sacred plants from the Ojibwe people, who are native to the Midwestern region of the U.S. the following was written about the use of tobacco:
Sacred herbs are powerful, but when misused or dis-respected, their power consumes us. Tobacco can be a healer or a destroyer. It depends on how and how often it is used. When used in a sacred way, it can promote good health and assist with spiritual guidance and growth.
I don’t know if or when I’ll use tobacco again but the more I learn about its sacred meaning, the less I feel compelled to use it, at least in the way that I have in the past. What I am compelled by, is this notion of sacredness and how our posture to something can change its effect on us. I certainly don’t think my foray into tobacco was sacred but I think, in some ways, my growth and understanding of this moment are.