How to do anything
especially if it's hard and it sucks
The emergency room in the Siwan hospital had dim flickering lighting and paint peeling off the walls. There were exposed wires coming out of holes in the ceiling and, somehow, no doors at all, anywhere. It looked and felt like the sort of place you might end up in a zombie video game.
I’m twenty four hours into quitting nicotine cold turkey and I’ve just been stung by a scorpion.
Pulling into the parking lot, I was handed off by the man who had driven me from my hotel to another guy who was already waiting for us when we got there. My new handler walked me directly past a crowd of people waiting and into a room where a doctor wearing a red “Fly Emirates” tracksuit was waiting to whisk me behind a curtain. He fished around in a desk drawer, pulled out two syringes, and administered two anti-venom shots in my ass without much ceremony.
I didn’t so much as show him a photo of my passport.
I made a promise to myself in that room, pants at my ankles, that when (if) I got home, I was going to have a cigarette. Just one, which my physical and emotional turmoil had totally earned me. The situation practically demanded it. I would still quit, but I just needed to taper. I’d start for real tomorrow.
That was a disgusting and rude prevarication.
Nicotine, I would learn, is a terrible liar.
I sucked a pacifier until I was four years old because I am and always have been Mister Comfort, Professor Lazybones — pleased to meet you. I have always hated doing hard things. In the eleven year stretch between my last pacifier and my first cigarette, I was deeply uncomfortable.
I am convinced that we all want comfort like we all want freedom. Incidentally, I’m convinced that we are all, in some way, a slave to something. For the illustrative purposes of this piece, I’ll use the example of the one thing I’ve been delightfully, shamefully shackled to for exactly half my life — nicotine products of any and all kinds.
By the time I was 18, living in San Francisco, there were days I’d spend my last ten dollars on a pack of Parliaments. On days I didn’t have ten dollars, I’d walk around the Mission asking my fellow derelicts to bum one off them. In the twelve years since, I’d never let myself go more than a few hours without nicotine.
I cheated during Ramadan and I was once kicked off a JetBlue flight from JFK to London Gatwick because I refused to stop vaping.
For fifteen years, I woke up every morning and let my desire for self-soothing outweigh my natural instincts to attain freedom or self actualization. One day, without much fanfare or explanation, that flipped.
I spotted an offramp.
I folded myself into an eight-hour overnight minivan from Cairo bound for the middle of the Sahara desert, to an oasis about fifty kilometers from the Libyan border, where I would smoke my last cigarette.
I took the offramp.
The first step to quitting anything is recognizing an offramp.
An offramp is when an idea to do something meets an opportunity to do that thing. Fleeting moments of realization are life’s great natural branching points. You’ve been driving down a highway for miles, and you see an exit. You either take it or you don’t — and if you don’t, you might not see another one for a long time.
My decision to quit smoking didn’t come to me in a moment of crisis. It came to me while I was basking poolside with a pack of Cleopatras at a Very Fancy Hotel, eating french fries and a crusts-off club sandwich while I enjoyed the lovely head-buzz combo from a crispy Coca Cola1, a 9mg Zyn, and a 5% Mint vape.
I know from thirty years of life experience on Earth that I will not do anything hard unless I really want it. I didn’t get sober from drugs and alcohol until I had internalized that, for me, this was a matter of life or death — and that I actually wanted to live. The body-deep reason has to already be there. I can’t psych myself into doing hard things. I have to feel it.
And yet, here was an offramp. I coughed, slurped, sunned by the pool, and while I squinted, here’s what I wrote in my notebook:
I’m somewhat plagued over the last couple of days with a sharp respiratory pain, gas, and bloating… I’m scared and hesitant to write these words, but I know it’s time. Siwa is where I’m going to quit nicotine. I’m tired of constantly oscillating between forms of intake: cigarettes, sinus, vaping — France banned Velo, and I buy 5% vapes in Egypt just because I legally can. I’m tired of always needing something to keep me pacified… Siwa can be a place for healing. I’ll stay until I’m ready. I expect radical personal transformation.
Sitting in that pool chair, I realized that I still wanted my comforts — but for the first time ever, I wanted freedom more. I was going to the desert anyway. I took the offramp.
To say it sucked would be putting it so sweetly. This was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
Nicotine is insidious, and it is a liar.
There’s a theory that nicotine and caffeine are highly sophisticated evolutionary vehicles by which the super-sentient and highly advanced tobacco and coffee plants get us idiotic and slavish humans to propagate them.
Most things that are bad for us are notoriously unreliable, but nicotine is special. My brain on nicotine will tell me, in the most mundane of moments that I’m totally the type of person who can casually light up and enjoy an evening with friends. It’s not that deep. Who are you to think so lowly of yourself, that you can’t enjoy a cigarette on the balcony, or after sex, or after a great meal?
Nicotine, I learned, has a ten-point plan on why I’m stronger than I make myself out to be, and it cannot wait for me to hear it. It tries to get me to listen by sending me a craving — it’s already hijacked my brain years ago. It knows how to press all my buttons.
A nicotine craving feels like microdosing on hopelessness. Actual, real-deal, there-is-no-point-in-carrying-on hopelessness. You can be going about an otherwise normal day and feeling perfectly fine when out of nowhere, the sense that nothing is good, or fair, or enjoyable — nor will anything ever be good, fair, or enjoyable ever again hits you like a train.
It’s incredible what lies and incentives my own brain came up with to try to get me to pick up a cigarette. Still coming up with ever more fantastical scenarios. If anyone needed any convincing that we create our own perceptual realities, look no further than the addict in withdrawal.
A scorpion sting, for contrast, feels like microdosing on lighting yourself on fire. It’s not sharp, the way you’d expect from a thing with a scaly pointy attack-tail. It’s sudden heat that doesn’t go away. You can feel the venom running up your arm even when the responsible scorpion, you learn, is a baby who is only the size of your fingernail.
There are two ways to treat a nicotine craving, and there are two ways to treat a scorpion sting. The most immediately effective way to address the former is to go smoke a cigarette. This makes the hopelessness immediately and completely go away for about half an hour. The second way is to do nothing at all.
When you do nothing, what felt inescapable moments earlier goes away all on its own — but not without dragging you through hell first. You will want to do everything to procure and smoke a cigarette to make that feeling of hopelessness go away… but if you keep doing nothing for long enough and it stops coming back altogether.
That’s called kicking the habit.
Unlike a nicotine craving, when you get stung by a scorpion and do nothing the pain does go away — but if it doesn’t come back twenty minutes later, it could be because the untreated sting has proven itself fatal and you are now dead.
The other way is to be rushed to an Egyptian hospital at 1am for anti-venom shots in the butt by Dr. Arsenal.
This is the only real difference between the two.
It’s like that great joke: what do hamsters and cigarettes have in common?2
Here’s what I wrote in my notebook during the worst of the withdrawals:
I am not so sure I recognize myself today against the backdrop of the me I was when I got on the bus to Siwa less than a week ago. Out of nowhere an idea grabbed me by the throat — I could just quit this thing that has controlled my life for 15 years. The love I needed was here. The soothers are always the Outside Things. Love Tools are the Always Been There Things.
I didn’t fully understand what I meant by that then — I was just scribbling down every bizarre and disjointed thought that popped into my head. I think I get it now though.
The things we reach for in hard moments — the pacifier, the cigarette, the drink, the swiping or the scrolling or the five more minutes of dreaming before waking up — those are the soothers. They effectively quiet the noise long enough for you to forget what you were looking for. The love tools, the actual things, were already there.
Basically, it’s the realization that you already have everything you’re looking for.
When I got sober — nearly a thousand days ago — my life looked unrecognizably different from how it looks today. I was excited to do the thing I’d known I needed, but had been putting off doing for months. I called friends and asked for resources. In retrospect, what a hilarious thing to ask for — resources — what I wanted was an easier, softer way. When the only options are drink or don’t drink — smoke or don’t smoke — I always want the trickity trick3 that’s going to get me to the end result without actually doing the hard thing.
I want to teleport to the finish line, and I want to make it look sexy!
I can’t skip the hard part, but I can grit my teeth and swear and whine about it and bitch and do frankly whatever I want, as long as I don’t pick up the thing I said I’d put down.
The same is true, I now see, for everything.
So, this is how to do anything: you choose the thing. You start doing it. Then, when you want so desperately with every reasonable fibre of your being to stop… you keep doing it.
In the case of quitting something, the doing is just not-doing. Your brain will amaze you at its ability to conjure these completely spectacular arguments for why today is gonna be just a fine exception — why you’ve earned it, why it’s not. that. deep.
Want to quit smoking? Ok — don’t smoke.
No one has ever put a cigarette to my lips and forced me to smoke it.
You don’t have to win the argument with yourself. Winning the argument is just realizing that you’ll never crack it — that sometimes, we’re just playing an unbeatable game.
I am no longer a person who smokes cigarettes. Why would I pick up a cigarette then? “I don’t do that anymore.” I say to myself still, today, over a month later. I know it’s not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a day at a time.
There’s no identity shift that’s a reward at the end, as much as I was expecting (and hoping for) one. I’m not even sure that there is an “end”. As far as I can tell, the identity shift is the method by which all things are accomplished. You aren’t white-knuckling your way toward becoming a different person.
I had to decide I was a certain kind of person, and then started acting like it.
My friend Kacie texted me the other day and asked me what dedication meant to me. I told her that I am not dedicated insomuch as that I am practicing dedication. After all, I am not living in the aftermath of the big bang — I am the big bang, still happening, thirteen billion years in.
The scorpion, by the way, was called a deathstalker. My mom had run the photo I’d sent her through a reverse Google image search within seconds of receiving it while I was too busy chewing out my Airbnb host for allowing such a gross oversight to happen on his property. I wasn’t thinking to look up whether or not the scorpion that was now dead on the floor of my room was in any way actually dangerous to me.
It very much was.
“Better treat it seriously,” mom wrote, in the most nonchalant text of her life. What she was not saying — to set off a panic — was that a deathstalker is the most venomous scorpion on earth!
But here I am. The anti-venom worked. I didn’t die.
I also, miraculously, didn’t smoke — even after promising myself, under those flickering lights, in that hospital, while Doc Soc came at me brandishing a needle, that I absolutely could and would.
I’m not saying there’s necessarily a lesson in that. If there was a lesson, it’d be this: if you’re trying to quit something and you get stung by a scorpion, and you still don’t do that thing that you’re trying not to do, you’ll come away from the whole experience with an invulnerability complex that will make it very hard to ever go back. Writing a substack and telling everyone you know only hammers in the point.
Start doing something. Don’t stop. Then keep doing it.
The finish line is a lie that’s designed to fuck you up.
-J
P.S. When I was 18, Kim from the indie band Matt and Kim told me that she’d give me $100 if I quit smoking. Kim— if you read this, call me.
The Very Fancy Hotel chain stocks exclusively Pepsi products. The stay was otherwise perfect, no notes — but VFH needs to get their shit together in this capacity.
They are both completely harmless until you stick one in your mouth and light it on fire.
I’m like Aang learning earthbending. Deep cut, but iykyk.
so good dude, the note about getting the work done is stellar