really an essay about addiction, coping mechanisms, behavior change

PSA: i’m going to be talking about cigarettes a bunch in this post. you know all the health advisory stuff. cigs are bad for you, etc etc.

A couple of hours ago when I was in the shower i was thinking about what sort of essay i might write tonight. i had this idea that i would start by talking about cigarettes, and how if you told me when i was 10 that i would be a cigarette smoker through my late teens and 20s, i would have found that kinda strange. My father was a cigarette smoker all my life. there were ashtrays everywhere, the smell of marlboro reds still reminds me of my childhood home. he’d smoke in the he still smokes today. i don’t think i’d ever have said “my father is uncool”, but i… did not model myself after him. i wanted to be someone different than anybody in my family, than anybody that i had in my immediate social reality, really. for many years i didn’t even encounter anybody in my country (Singapore) that made me think “yeah I wanna be like them”. as a singaporean i’m always conflicted about singapore. there’s a part of me that loves it, in the active sense of, i want to love it, i want to be a good citizen, i want to give back to my homeland, i want to contribute. i romanticize it sometimes. then there’s a part of me that has been just so unimpressed. i’m reminded of a line that Dwayne Johnson said about his dad, something like, “my dad loved me to the best of his ability, which was limited.” I feel that way about my own social reality growing up. I feel bad for saying that, but that’s the truth of how i felt. i have all these notes i’ve collected over the years of all the criticisms people have had about singapore, both from locals and outsiders. it’s so sterile, boring, superficial, materialistic, money-minded,

i wanted to be someone like the people i read about in books, or the people who wrote those books. i wanted to be like Tom Chiarella, a staff writer at Esquire who wrote beautiful articles. though i suppose i didn’t read him until i was a teenager skipping school to “study” in libraries. i used to stay up late at night posting on internet forums, then i’d wake up, get on the bus “to school”, and catch up on sleep until I got to the esplanade library. there i would pick up stacks of magazines to read “as rewards” for making progress on my homework, and then really ignore my homework entirely to just read the magazines. in hindsight, the wild thing is that this was exactly the right thing to do, for me! and I felt so much guilt and shame for it. if I could retroactively redesign my life, i would have skipped school almost entirely apart from a handful of classes with a handful of teachers that i liked, and spend the vast majority of my time reading books and magazines and posting online.

i wanted to be like calvin from calvin and hobbes– clever, witty, rich inner world, irreverent, cheekily disdainful of authority. i wanted to be like the detective kids in those enid blyton stories, solving mysteries and confounding the adults. i wanted to be like so many anime and RPG protagonists, bringing together a ragtag group of unlikely friends to save the day. as a teenager i wanted to be a rockstar, though i’m not sure if there’s any particular guy i’d point at. the rockstar i most admired and wanted to emulate was hayley williams from paramore, and she’s still someone i study and learn from to this day. for a while i liked to use K’ Dash from King of Fighters as an avatar.

i was 29 years old when i finally thought to look up “tamil nobel prize winners”, it turns out there are 3 of them, 2 in physics and 1 in chemistry. here i suppose we could go into a tangent about “representation” but i’m not sure i really want to get into that right now. i wanted to talk about cigarettes… and punctuation

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the thing that i really loved about cigarettes was how they would punctuate my day. well- “love” is always a complicated business, but i relied on them for that. and to rely on something is so often to both love it and resent it, isn’t it? they gave me a sense of structure and pace that i found comforting, compelling. lots of people try cigarettes and manage not to become habitual smokers, i think because it doesn’t scratch an itch for them. whereas with heavy smokers, you’ll basically always find that the cigarettes are something they’re relying on for something. cigarettes, while terrible for your health in the long-term, are great for self-medicating your blood sugar levels. i’ve rarely ever met a smoker who didn’t know that cigarettes are bad for them. or someone eating junk food, or drinking too much, etc. the issue is rarely a lack of knowledge of long-term effects. the issue is usually some kind of short-term pain that demands relief. the misunderstanding of the nature of coping mechanisms entrenches them further. (i like calling them copes for short, i think it ought to be a value neutral word). you can’t moralize away a cope. to dismantle it you typically have to first understand what function it is serving, and then take care of those functions.

i don’t actually want this to be an essay about cigarettes. i’m leaning into wanting it to be a little bit about behavior, and structure, and coping mechanisms. but not just that either. there’s something beyond that that i haven’t grasped yet. i took a few minutes to skim and scan the earlier paragraphs, embellish them a little bit with more details. i tab-switched to twitter to scroll around a bit to see if anything would come up, and i was reminded of a mini breakthrough i had when thinking about how I used to describe my notebooks as full of “false starts”, and how that was a misused metaphor carelessly taken from sports/athletics and used in art. once i reframed it to be about sketches and studies, i felt so much better, so much more free

mmm that feels like the-thing-beyond. beyond the stimuli and the structure is reconceptualization. renewal, rebirth…

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Load bearing copes: quitting stuff that’s *totally* bad for you is easy. quitting “bad habits” etc is hard because there’s some way in which the bad habit is addressing some otherwise unmet need. the coping mechanism is bearing a load that the person does not currently know how to bear without it

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• Focus on what you want to see more of
• Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve been trying to modify my behaviors. I was initially very unsuccessful, almost nothing I tried worked, and anything that worked didn’t seem to last very long. I couldn’t seem to bring myself to study for exams in school, even with direct pressure from family, and implicit pressure from peers and society. I was skinny and wanted to be more muscular. I’d go to the gym and forcefeed myself milk and eggs and protein shakes. I’d try to pick up running.
• Not everything was a failure. Some things worked better than other things in some domains. I managed to do a lot of writing, which ended up becoming maybe the dominant good thing in my life, the thing through which all other good things came.
• I got marginally better over time. I picked up smoking when I was 17, and become a moderately heavy smoker fairly quickly, averaging about 7-8 sticks a day, sometimes more if I was hanging out with other smokers.
• I played in a band and tried to get myself to practice. I practiced some, but not nearly as much or as well as I wish I did. I would say I got moderately decent at it- learning some simple music theory, understanding basic chords, but looking back I think it’s very obvious that my learning methods were far from optimal.
• A video I watched that really stuck with me was of Steve Vai, a professional, virtuosic guitarist, giving a talk about how to practice. He talked about the importance of visualizing, of setting aside time devoted purely to focused practice
• if i listed out my opinions on dumbass bullshit i would never have time to do any meaningful work