Despite decades of public health campaigns, smoking remains stubbornly persistent. Around 10% of American adults still smoke cigarettes, while millions more use e-cigarettes and other nicotine products. Nicotine is among the most addictive substances known, altering the brain’s reward pathways and making quitting notoriously difficult.
Most people who smoke want to stop. Many try repeatedly before they succeed.
I first tried to quit smoking when I was 24 years old. By then, I’d already been smoking for 13 years; I’d started when I was 11 years old by picking up discarded cigarette butts in the neighborhood while I was out wandering. This was made possible because I was left home alone for exceedingly long stretches of time. I was mostly very lonely and lost.
Smoking was my small yet very satisfying declaration of war. Against the people who didn’t love me the way they were supposed to. Against a childhood that didn’t look like other kids’. But most of all, I was declaring war against myself. After all, no one can kill you if you beat them to it.
In college, my smoking habit hovered at a solid two packs of Marlboro Lights a day. I do remember a very dark period when I was pushing three packs a day of Marlboro Reds.
By that point, smoking had come to serve many purposes depending on the day: social crutch, stress reliever, identity scaffolding, hobby, appetite suppressant, emotional support object, shield, sword. With each deep, satisfying drag I was still fighting the good fight—against whom exactly it was no longer clear.
As I headed to Japan my junior year for a semester abroad, my daily cigarette intake was still hovering at around two packs.
I agreed to climb Mt. Fuji with my brand-new group of outdoorsy friends—this, even though I had not exercised in my entire life. Also, I had never hiked. Being clueless did help in some ways. I was not the least bit nervous when we finally set out to climb on the eve of my 21st birthday. How hard could it be?
Turn outs, really, really, really hard.
Especially when you do the whole thing in the borderline reckless fashion of college kids. We set out at the end of September, the very end of climbing season. And while I did have borrowed hiking boots and five cotton turtlenecks, I didn’t have any of the proper, necessary gear like a parka. We set out far too late, which meant we would summit at sunset in temperatures cold enough that my camera froze. The wind was so strong that the smallest among us were almost blown off our feet.
But I will never forget how I felt when we finally made it to the top. I stood above the clouds, looking out over an endless horizon. It felt, for the first time, like hope.
I’d love to say I descended Mt. Fuji and immediately quit smoking, seized the day and lived happily ever after. Regrettably, it wasn’t that simple or that quick. But that day, it was like an invisible door had popped open. Just a crack. Enough to let the light in.
Four years later, I quit smoking for the first time. I was on the cusp of graduating from law school. I flashed back to the top of Mt. Fuji, the world seemingly laid out before me.
In the same spirit of adventure, I signed up for the New York City Marathon with the plan of becoming the kind of person who did such things and who did not smoke. After all, I’d once been a person who had never climbed a mountain. The sheer terror of marathon training certainly kept me off cigarettes for a solid six months. It also turned me into a runner.
That is, a runner who took up smoking again a few months after completing that first marathon—turns out you can do both (where there’s a will, there’s a way).
Through it all, quitting smoking is one of the hardest things I have ever done. And I have done my share of hard things. It took several, white-knuckled tries to get it right, even once I had become a person who very much wanted to quit. But being that person first was, for me, the most important part.
In the years since, I’ve run four marathons, two ultramarathons, completed an Olympic distance triathlon, two half-ironman triathlons (despite not really knowing how to swim), and climbed many mountains.
Each one of those endeavors has given me belief in myself, usually at times in my life when things have felt hopelessly off-course. When I’ve desperately needed to be reminded of what hope feels like.
Looking back on Mt. Fuji three decades later, I realize now that what I felt that day wasn’t just hope. It was also awe. The awe of seeing that not only did I have the chance for a better future—one filled with love and beauty and kindness—but that I had a hand in making it so. I had the chance to make what felt impossible, possible.
In doing so, that first mountain and the hope it brought set me free.
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