Living With Regret and Respect

Cigarettes, Love, and Hate (TW: eating disorders)

I haven’t shared this bit of news yet, but I’m currently writing a children’s book (!!!!) and my first manuscript deadline is next week. I also got sick with the flu. So I decided I’d just share an old piece from a class I took a while back. It’s still rough and unfinished but in thinking so much about my health lately, I thought it would be appropriate to share. Helpful maybe for some of you, helpful definitely for me so I can focus on my deadline. Try out the prompt for yourself (it’s from the poem The Facts of Life written by

Pádraig Ó Tuama

) and see what it brings out for you.

WRITING PROMPT:

That you will learn to live with regret.
That you will learn to live with respect.

also, I have asthma...

When I told my eating disorders specialist that I was smoking again, she blinked, cocked her head (as she often does when she’s about to say something profound) and asked: “Why do you hate yourself so much?”

“HATE MYSELF?” I wondered.

“Hate myself?” I said out loud.

I didn’t understand.

“You see,” I tried to explain to her, “I smoke because it stops me from binge eating. It keeps me from doing what actually IS harmful to myself. I smoke because it’s a pleasure. It’s one of my greatest indulgences. If it’s between two boxes of Girl Scout Tagalongs or just one cigarette — which yeah, I know is bad for my lungs — then isn’t the cigarette ultimately the better choice? Just because I’m making a conscious decision to increase my risk of cancer one day, it doesn’t mean that I HATE myself!”

Now that I read that sentence out loud, I can see where she was coming from. But back then, I muttered something like, “I don’t know.”

Maybe. Maybe she nodded and listened. Or, maybe she challenged me with something even more profound after that… I don’t remember. It was over 20 years ago. And I still feel that rumbling confusion in my chest. The accusation that I could hate myself. Moi? I got a BA in Women’s Studies and in all the text books and feminist theory classes, they spelled it out clearly: eating-disorders = bad! None said much on the matter of cigarettes. In fact, a few of the authors smoked themselves. I remember my classmates remarking how bad ass I was for rolling my own tobacco! So I couldn’t have been hating myself. I was doing the work. I was addressing my eating disorder. I was empowering myself by making a choice. In fact, consciously choosing the lesser of two evils proved I was actively self loving!

Uh… right?

My eating disorder has remained dormant since the days of those sessions, and I replaced my post-meal cigarettes with candies/gum — something anybody who has read my food blog of 10 years would know.

I never considered smoking an addiction, even though I continued to inhale many a cigarette since. And not because I was a smoker — no, no, no — mostly for sanity reasons. After a fight with my husband. To bribe me to go out instead of staying on my couch all day. To stop me from feeling alone and scared when I have to walk the dog alone by myself late at night. To be social! I have so much trouble being around others as it is, and taking a smoke break is like a security blanket that helps me feel more at ease. Smoking helps me think! Smoking helps me poop!

And also, smoking is sometimes my actual job — for the characters that I play in movies. At least six of them have smoked. They’re not always written that way, but I’ve encouraged the director to add it. Because it adds a dimension of internal struggle. It’s a device! It’s a story plot! It’s for my art!

Maybe, just maybe, all of those characters “hate themselves” too?

I still don’t agree with my therapist that I hated myself, but lately — since having to go on birth control and knowing how that increases my risk for blood clots/heart disease/strokes/general unpleasantness — I have made the decision to officially retire from smoking. My emergency stash of Parliament Lights which I’ve had for over 15 years was destroyed last summer. So it’s been almost a year since my last cigarette, and I have no intention of ever going back.

I wonder if this means that I finally love myself?

Or, I think… I think it means that I am learning to live with respect. For myself. For others around me. For the environment that I don’t respect when I stub out the Parliaments (they have the most indestructible filter) with my sneaker and don’t bother to pick it up/throw it away. Respect for my clothes that I no longer have to clean and then double clean because the smoke has lingered.

Maybe if my therapist had asked me “Why do you have such little respect for yourself?” all those years ago I may have gotten to this place sooner. I can learn to live with the concept of respect. Hate is still uncomfortable, and if I’m being completely honest, so is the idea of love.