Opinion
20 years smoke free
If I did it, you can do it too
© Knut Wiarda (symbol photo) / Adobe Stock
Susanne Arndt stopped smoking 20 years ago today. Here she reveals what helped her – and why she didn’t shed a tear after the cigarettes. Almost no.
The fact that cigarettes are out is only partly thanks to the Federal Non-Smoker Protection Act of 2007, which sends smokers out the door in many places. It is also due to the e-cigarettes being pushed onto the market as a supposedly clean alternative – by the same corporations that have killed countless people because they managed to brand smoking as cool and sexy. Just as young people today fall for supposedly clean “vapes”, we fell for “Liberté Toujours” back then. What did we care about lung cancer and stroke? Only the philistines were worried!
A turning point that is worth it
Exactly 20 years ago to the day I also became a philistine and stopped smoking after 23 years. I took the motivation for this from an uncool but healthy fear of smoking-related diseases. I had seen more and more often the man with tongue cancer who, in the 1980s, shared a room with my father, who at the time was in the hospital with vocal cord cancer (thankfully just curable).
The man held a piece of paper under my nose on which he had written: “Life is nothing without a tongue. No kisses, no speaking, no eating.” I didn’t want to end up like that.
A Quit smoking not only feels like a turning point, it is one. I suspected that it wouldn’t be easy to break out of an addiction and habit that had been woven into my identity for decades. I’ve been a smoker since I was 14! That’s why I planned my quitting smoking carefully: First, I agreed with a friend to quit together on March 1, 2004. But everyone prepared for the deadline individually: I reduced my consumption for weeks beforehand until I was down from my daily pack to three cigarettes, while reading Allen Carr’s book “Finally a Non-Smoker!”, which made it clear to me that I really wanted to I smoked not for pleasure, but because I needed to replenish my nicotine supply, and started jogging so that I wouldn’t climb the walls when I was craving cigarettes. I also told those around me about my plan and opened a non-smoking forum in the BRIGITTE community, which many people took part in. The fact that I shared my plan with as many people as possible helped immensely: social pressure is powerful.
And even though I thought when I quit that nothing would be more fun from now on (the vacation! the coffee! the alcohol! the going out! the sex!), I didn’t shed a tear after the cigarettes. Wait, that’s not entirely true. Shortly after quitting smoking, I once ran through the streets crying for no reason, not knowing what was wrong with me. Peter Lindinger, qualified tobacco cessation psychologist at the German Cancer Research Center, explained to me afterwards that this was a well-known phenomenon:
“Many women feel more vulnerable, 20 to 30 percent have a stronger urge to cry. For them, smoking was a universal coping pattern. Without cigarettes, they feel at the mercy of their emotions and they no longer have the opportunity to do anything about it.”
That’s exactly how it felt. But like everything in life, it passed.
I’m still waiting for the promised great sense of taste and exuberant fitness. But I’m still just grateful that I no longer have to pay corporations to let me die statistically ten years earlier, even painfully. And for anyone who still doubts that a life without cigarettes is worth living: it is! Coffee, vacation, alcohol, sex – everything is just as beautiful or boring as it is as a smoker. You won’t miss anything, absolutely nothing, once you’ve left the addiction behind you. You’ll just wonder how you ever managed to inhale the toxic smoke. Especially since there’s really nothing to be said for it: unlike other drugs, nicotine doesn’t even make you high – and smoking isn’t cool anymore.