Writing this means you get to read a part of me. A story screamed from the edge of a meltdown, disgusting, tasteful, and somehow still bearable. Lately, I’ve been thinking about smoking and addiction, how they've become part of my daily life: messy, embarrassing, oddly comforting. This reflection is my attempt to understand that relationship. This is not a love letter to cigarettes, not even close, but it may be. If I had to think about it, I’ve smoked Davidoff, Seven Stars, Mevius, Camel and Marlboro, but also the fun Japanese ones, Pianissimo and Seven Stars, and so much more I can’t even name.
Think about the money. The value of a cigarette is actually insane when you think about it. One pack is basically a house shop, which I say with complete confidence, even though I still live with my parents and have no idea what a “full shop” costs. It’s like celebrities claiming water is €15 because they’ve never been inside a Lidl. Tone-deafness I relate to more than I should. The way I go to my room with no mold and a bed with radiation blasting in my face like it’s my birthright, only to wake up in night sweats about the housing crisis, makes me realize how much I've spent on this habit without truly noticing.
My friend Alisha mentioned she was walking past a child having a cigarette, cue dramatic kid coughing, and yeah, I did that too when I was younger, the kid who fake-coughed around strangers hoping they’d feel guilty and repent. Alisha loved it. She’s a grown-up now. I had a similar moment where the universe basically laughed at me. I’m 23, sitting at a bus stop, alone, minding my own business, when a lady shows up with her pram and says, “No smoke.” Deep in my cold heart, I wanted to say, respectfully, I don’t give a fuck. Still, instead I nodded humiliated, immediately texting my friend Ly because why would I process a feeling when I can impulsively vent it away?
When I started smoking properly, I framed it as a “nasty habit,” the way teachers say they’re “being good” while eating salad or how my mom, who looks fantastic, swears dieting is working even when she’s having a sweet treat “here and there.” So I told myself smoking wasn’t a nasty habit at all. It was just a passing indulgence. A phase. A summertime accessory. I announced to literally everyone with ears that it was temporary, just for the season. I couldn’t imagine smoking in winter anyway. It doesn’t even warm you up. Summer ended, and I didn’t. I asked friends travelling abroad to bring me cigarettes like they were souvenir fridge magnets.
I get paranoid sometimes, buying a box, the warning images, the diseased lungs, the aggressive “SMOKING SERIOUSLY HARMS YOU AND OTHERS AROUND YOU,” but then, in some deranged way, it just reminds me of Tumblr. Suddenly, the morbidity becomes nostalgic. Smoking is lonely even when you swear you’re a social smoker. I made all these rules: don’t smoke near home, don’t smoke in daylight, don’t smoke anywhere someone can recognise me. Then I broke all of them because I just wanted to smoke. The excuses became ornate, like little lies I curated just for myself.
Sometimes I light a cigarette simply because my hand remembers the choreography. Not because there’s a moment. Habit performed itself. You talk, you light, you forget about it entirely, let it burn out, waste it. Smoking is muscle memory, not desire-an act of control and routine that many can relate to, fostering a sense of shared experience. I’ve tried things because they were handed to me in a circle. That’s how it works. I’ve smoked things that were absolutely rank and not for me, handing them back like a meal I wanted refunded. My circle shaped what I tried, but they aren’t to blame. I like to pretend I have this intense self-control, like I’m above it, but then I find myself leaving the club to go to the shop at 1 am to buy another pack because the demons told me to. It’s embarrassing how willing I am to forsake basic living just to feel nicotine hit the back of my throat.
Opening a fresh box feels like a ritual. A ceremony. The closest thing I’ve had to religion lately. Then someone asks, “How many do you smoke a day?” and suddenly I’m a novelist. I craft elaborate reasons. I become philosophical. I blame life events. I paint myself as a tortured artist and, in a way, I guess I am.
There’s a superiority to saying “I can quit whenever.” I’ve announced quitting like a national holiday, as if I were issuing a press statement. It was almost parade-worthy. I wanted a billboard that said, 'I AM QUITTING.' But I failed miserably because summer happened, and everyone around me was smoking. As pathetic as it sounds, I just wanted to be part of that moment, to feel connected even in my struggle to quit. It's a constant battle between my desire to stop and the pull of the social and emotional comfort smoking provides.
I vaped too, if you’re wondering. It didn’t help. I told myself vaping was so totally healthy, like swapping smoking for cotton-candy air was some moral upgrade. My inner child didn’t get it, because why inhale strawberry clouds when you could eat jellies and drink Coke like a normal person, but I tried. People would dramatically throw their vapes into water like baptisms to prove they quit. Meanwhile, after having a massive, long conversation about why it’s so wrong, I’ll have a cigarette at the following function.
Addiction makes you delusional but also poetic. It gives you rituals, excuses, memories, identities, and shame all at once. And even with all the embarrassment, all the contradictions, all the ways I pretend I’m above the habit, I know I’m not. Not yet
What’s funny, or maybe tragic, is how smoking became this barometer for how much control I pretend to have over my life. Every time I say I’ll stop, I imagine myself becoming this enlightened, glowing, hydrating, celery-juice-drinking version of me who wakes up early and journals, but then the real me wakes up at noon with a dry throat, scrolls through TikTok, and maybe does my skincare.
I always feel like I should be above addiction. Not because I’m better than anyone else, but because I’ve always seen myself as the observer, the guy with enough self-awareness to dodge the crash before it happens, but that’s the biggest joke addiction plays. It convinces you that watching yourself spiral is the same as not spiralling at all. I can narrate the downfall with the accuracy of a documentary filmmaker and still not change a single behavioral pattern.
My life has become a series of small negotiations with myself. You won’t smoke on weekdays. You will. You won’t buy a box; you’ll only accept cigarettes offered to you. You will absolutely buy a box. You’ll only smoke when you drink. You drink once, and suddenly you’re chain-smoking. You’ll quit when you turn 25. You won’t. You’ll quit when summer ends. You didn’t.
I think about the versions of myself I’ve promised I would become, and all of them were smoke-free. It’s like the future self I imagine is allergic to everything the current me finds comforting, and it’s honestly embarrassing wanting to be someone cleaner than I am.
But cigarettes make everything feel cinematic. Stupid, but cinematic. They turn waiting for the bus into a film scene. They turn heartbreak into something you can hold between your fingers. They turn boredom into performance. I think part of me is addicted to the aesthetic of it, how pathetic and dramatic it makes me feel in an almost glamorous way.
Sometimes I sit with my therapist, slumped in that stupid chair staring at the carpet, and I’ll say something like, “Yeah, I know it’s bad for me. I’m not an idiot, but it’s the one thing that makes those late-night walks feel like… I don’t know… like they mean something. Otherwise it’s just me, taking laps around my estate trying not to think too hard.”and the therapist, this calm, dead-eyed type, will do that little nod, like they’re reading my soul off a clipboard, and go, “It’s not really about the nicotine. It’s loneliness. Its structure. It’s a reward cycle. Childhood patterns. Self-soothing.” All that psychoanalysing that somehow feels like a punch and a hug at the same time and I’ll sit there thinking, great, so now even my bad habits have emotional baggage.
There’s a weird comfort in rituals that hurt you. They give you something predictable in a world where everything else feels slippery. Lighting a cigarette feels like pressing pause on the chaos, even when it is the chaos. But here’s the absolute truth. I’m not ready to quit. Not because I can’t, because I can, but because cigarettes still feel like a tiny moment of control in a life where everything else is moving too fast.
And maybe one day I’ll wake up, and the craving will be gone, or the ritual won’t feel like a ritual anymore, or the smell will make me nauseous. Maybe I’ll become the version of myself who quits gracefully, quietly, without making it an entire identity project.
But right now, I’m still in the thick of it, romanticising my downfall, lighting excuses like matches, smoking outside bus
