Snarky Dad

Welcome back to my blog and journey.

I’m finding myself today thinking about how, in a month and a half from now, it will be two years since I quit smoking after doing it for over 20 years.

It’s a habit I wish I didn’t have. Growing up as a kid, my mother used to smoke. She quit when I was about 20 years old, and back then I used to lecture her and dramatically fake-cough whenever she lit up. But this was the 80s, and smoking indoors was completely customary. I’m pretty sure she used to rest her ashtray on my head when I laid my head in her lap while we watched TV together. (If you’re reading this and younger than Gen X, that’s just how life was back then — definitely not something that flies today.) So I never thought I’d ever find myself smoking a cigarette.

Surprisingly, I only started smoking at age 23 — way later than when people usually start. But then the millennium arrived, and I went with friends to celebrate Y2K in Amsterdam. Back in the day, that was pretty much the only place on the planet where smoking weed was legal, purchased in special coffee shops, and genuinely exciting. To this day, I actually love the smell of weed and don’t mind people smoking it near me (though I still can’t stand cigarette smoke). That trip is where my love affair with weed started.

After a 10-month trip to India, I realized I couldn’t run a normal life back home while smoking as much weed as I did there. So a stupid idea came to mind: “Perhaps if I try a cigarette instead, it will take the craving away.” Well, spoiler alert: it didn’t take the desire for weed away, but after the first cigarette I thought, “Hey, this is nice too.” Over the years, I quit weed because — life. But cigarettes stuck with me because — life.

As life went on, I got married, got a standard desk job where I sat most of the day, slouched on the sofa for the rest of it, and generally lived a routine life, losing daily to an average potato on mobility score.

It quietly crept up on me. Then one day, I tried to pick up my daughter’s stroller with her in it. Felt a jolt in my lower back. And I thought to myself, yeah, I’d better stretch this and it will be fine. It wasn’t fine. A few hours later, my lower back literally froze and dropped me to the floor right where I stood. Luckily, it happened inside my apartment. I couldn’t move for two days until I managed to stand somewhat straight. My mother-in-law recommended I visit her Chinese doctor. He got me up and walking again using acupuncture and gave me some exercises to avoid future spasms. He bluntly told me, “If you’re not going to do any exercises, you can expect to keep seeing me here.” And being the wise doctor he was, I did end up seeing him two or three more times over the years. Eventually, he moved his clinic further away, and traveling to him with a frozen back became a terrifying ordeal when I could barely move. So I found a local physiotherapist nearby.

He gave me the exact same verdict: “Are you planning on exercising? Are you planning on being a returning client?” When my plan for old age was sticking around and embarrassing my kids in front of my grandkids, and maybe even living enough to see my great grandkids. And then embarrass all the generations in between to my utter delight, and hopefully, their utter dismay. That’s when I had an honest moment with myself. I realized I was actually terrified of exercising because I was a smoker, and I was too afraid to find out just how terrible my shape had become. On the few occasions I had tried working out, the shortness of breath immediately freaked me out. So I kept shoving the whole issue into the dark drawer at the back of my mind, refusing to touch it.

But like everything we bury in our minds, it kept building up — until I hit the upper half of my 40s (or the fifth decade of my life, in case you’re struggling with math). That sounded dangerously old, and my brain’s healthy blend of paranoia and hypochondria kicked in. I pictured myself in my 70s — a frail old man who falls on his ass, breaks a hip, gets a cane, then a walker, then a wheelchair, until his kids ship him off to a nursing home that basically just helps him die faster.

Yeah, extreme and exaggerated, I know. But you’re my kidnapped reader, so you get to suffer my train of thought.

That nightmare scenario gave me the final push I needed. I read Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking. I knew it wasn’t some magical Hogwarts textbook, but I promised myself I’d believe every word in it. And it worked. I smoked my last cigarette and never picked one up again.

Heads up: some links in this post are Amazon affiliate links. If you buy through them, I get a small cut at no extra cost to you — one step closer to the man cave. I only link stuff I’ve actually used myself.

Here’s a detail I didn’t mention yet: I actually had that book sitting on my shelf for more than a decade before I finally read it. If you’re a smoker struggling to quit, I’ll let you in on something — there’s an unspoken, subconscious fear of quitting, even when you know full well it’s good for you. I only understood that about myself after I’d already quit. I was genuinely afraid that if I read the book, I’d actually stop smoking, and some part of me wasn’t ready for that yet. Sounds illogical, right? Everyone knows quitting is good for you, so why wouldn’t you just do it — but that’s how addiction works. The book actually gets into this too: smokers carry a fear of losing their cigarette, and that fear is exactly what keeps you from quitting in the first place. Recognizing that fear in myself is what finally pushed me to pick the book up and read it.

Free of cigarettes (even though I gained a few extra kilos — sorry, not American, no pounds or square eagles per donut here), I decided: “Now that you’ve stopped smoking, there’s no excuse not to find out how bad your physical shape really is.” So I did the only logical thing: going from zero exercise straight to trying MMA.

My 40-something body reacted as expected after 20+ years of neglect — it started breaking down. Back I went to my physiotherapist, who looked at me with that pitiful look usually reserved for the frailest of men doing jackass level of stupidity moves, and said: “My God, Ben, how idiotic can you be? Jumping straight to MMA? You need to build yourself up first.” What followed was a series of weekly sessions — a delightful, borderline-abusive routine of bone-breaking massages, suction cups that left purple marks for weeks, and Western acupuncture (where they drive 10 cm needles into your nerves, making you jiggle in a very unsightly manner).