Member-only story
This Is Us
How I Actually Quit Smoking in 2020
In a year loaded with loss, I scored one massive win: I finally said goodbye to cigarettes
As if Connecticut wasn’t awful enough, it will forever be home to my first cigarette. A Kamel — with a K! — Red Light on the evening of July 4, 2001. I was 18, fresh out of transfer orientation at the University of North Carolina and rolling on ecstasy with the woman I would leave my girlfriend for. We burned through a pack per over the course of eight hours.
In hindsight, that paragraph turned out to be the most loaded series of bad decisions I’d ever make in my life: I wouldn’t build another relationship that measured up to my first until 2019. I started a four-year drug-induced descent into destitution and debauchery that didn’t end until doing my weight — which dropped to 125 — in blow behind the bar in the spring of 2005. I never actually graduated from UNC, instead going through a convoluted series of dropouts, major changes, and transfers before securing a B.A. in Psychology from the University at Buffalo with a GPA just higher than my BAC. And, on top of that, no one should ever go to Connecticut.
