How To 'Finish' Smoking

This is a story about quitting smoking, but one without the usual advice and tips and tricks that we’re used to. And that makes any piece of writing about that so incommensurably boring.

David Sedaris tells us, with a lot of humor, his love affair with cigarettes. And I think many of the smokers out there can identify with at least some of the steps in this toxic relationship. Personally, I can relate to almost all the stages of the idyl. From the early one when I was disgusted by every one around me who smoked, to refusing to buy cigarettes for my parents or friends, to getting hooked up on it and turning it into an obsession.

I love the way he describes the hoarding paranoid behavior that smokers tend to show at some point in their addiction. 

Of course, what this article comes down to is that, when we’re talking smoking (or maybe any kind of addiction), each of us needs to come up with a customized trick, or a story to tell ourselves in order to be able to quit. And it has to be noted that it was a German woman who helped Sedaris come up with his narrative for quitting.

“Her name was Tini Haffmans, and though she often apologized for the state of her English. I once asked if her neighbor smoked, and she thought for a moment before saying, “Karl has . . . finished with his smoking.

She meant, of course, that he had quit, but I much preferred her mistaken version. “Finished” made it sound as if he’d been allotted a certain number of cigarettes, three hundred thousand, say, delivered at the time of his birth. If he’d started a year later or smoked more slowly, he might still be at it, but, as it stood, he had worked his way to the last one, and then moved on with his life. This, I thought, was how I would look at it. Yes, there were five more Kool Milds in that particular pack, and twenty-six cartons stashed away at home, but those were extra—an accounting error. In terms of my smoking, I had just finished with it.”