A Millennial Looks at 40
Everything smelled like cigarette smoke when I was a kid. You could smoke in an airplane. You could smoke in a taxi. You could smoke in Burger King. I smoked my first cigarette when I was nine. It took a lot of practice to learn to inhale and exhale without choking, but I was passionate, and I got very good at it. Self-taught, as they say. Imagine a ten-year-old girl on Rollerblades doing figure eights on a quiet evening road in the suburbs, flicking a butt into the neighbor’s flower garden. That was me. I smoked riding my bike at night, no hands, with my eyes closed. That was freedom. I smoked waiting for my mom to pick me up from my piano lesson. That was relaxing. I stole cigarettes from my aunt, who bought Chesterfields by the carton and never noticed if a pack went missing here or there. At some point, I’d heard that smoking stunts your growth. That’s why I started. I did not want to grow up.
Can you blame me? I was born in 1981, on the cusp of the millennial generation, innocent little babies forced to contend with the idea of the future in a way that no previous generation had for a thousand years. Prince wrote a song called “1999” celebrating our terror. I was a real wunderkind of anxiety, preternaturally mature and very uptight, so addiction came easy to me. I believe I emerged from the womb with an edge I have desperately needed to take off since. On the outside, I was a high-achieving introvert. Like an old man selling life insurance door-to-door, I dutifully packed up my backpack in the mornings and walked to school with the weight of existential dread on my shoulders. Sometimes I smoked along the way, hiding behind trees or cutting through someone’s back lawn. There was not a pathology or diagnosis for this behavior back then. It was simply “being bad.” Just before I turned 11, I watched Nirvana perform on Saturday Night Live, then turned to my big sister and said, “See? Nothing matters.” When Kurt Cobain killed himself two years later, I didn’t cry. I simply lit a cigarette and told myself that nihilism was the best philosophy. Nicotine was good at making an idea stick: Smoke a cigarette, turn a feeling into a credo. Whether smoking would kill me seemed irrelevant because I could not imagine that I would live a long time anyway. By the time I was old enough to buy cigarettes, I’d been smoking half my life.
Now, like my fellow millennials, I’m forced to confront the reality of entering middle age. I turned 40 not long ago, but I don’t feel middle-aged. I don’t have kids. I own a house and I’m married, but my husband and I spend more time making popcorn and wrestling than we do balancing a checkbook or watching the news. I don’t have a clean house, and I don’t have any friends who are doctors. I have no beige rugs. That’s what I thought being middle- aged meant when I was a kid, being lame and
organized and middle-class, like the parents in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I don’t use Sweet’N Low. I don’t belong to a racquet club. I still get pimples, I still watch cartoons, and with excruciating self-denial, I keep my weight the same as it was when I was 13 years old. In these totally meaningless ways, according to a rubric determined by my favorite movies from the 1980s, I have effectively preserved my youth.
In other ways, my youth has been wasted and ineffectual. Nicotine was not my only addiction. I used to wake up at four in the morning to jump rope in the basement while I watched infomercials. I had so much anxiety, I spent most of my life trying to exhaust it out of me. By the time I was in high school, I hated everything, had nothing nice to say, and kept all my positive aspirations squeezed tightly inside a tortured fist of perfectionism. I had just as much talent as I do now but no facility to express it with, which was maddening. I tried to hide from this inside a cloud of smoke, and I kept my parents at arm’s length so they wouldn’t suspect me. I never said, “I’m unhappy.” It was obvious. If I were a character in a John Hughes movie, I’d be the little sister who doesn’t leave her room, or the exchange student who refuses to learn the language. I was never carefree and wonderful. I never danced at parties. I never enjoyed myself at all. I preferred to stay home and watch people act carefree and wonderful on television.
We all know why adulthood is something to stave off: We don’t want to die, and we don’t want to be like our parents. The irony is that sometimes these desires cancel each other out. My refusal to grow up has made for some paradoxical consequences. For example, in my strident efforts to maintain my youthful figure, I have prematurely aged my bones. My perfectionism turned into an anxious need to control just about everything, which is very annoying, a definite imperfection. And in my rebellion against mainstream fashion standards for grown-up women, I have an enormous hoard of insane clothing and jewelry that I do not wear. On an average day, I look like a pizza delivery boy: red windbreaker, baggy jeans, dirty sneakers. But notice I did not write “pizza delivery man.” God forbid. I’m a girl, and I didn’t want to be a woman. I started shaving my pubic hair as soon as I noticed it growing, because I understood that there was power in innocence: As a child, I was not to blame for the state of the world. Stay small, I told myself. That will keep you safe.
This article appeared in the Summer 2023 issue of Esquire
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I’m the tallest woman in my family, but smoking did stunt my growth. For nearly three decades, I parlayed an addiction to nicotine into an excuse to avoid my life—to leave the room during a fight, to deny that the clock was ticking, to make myself too sick and too fragile to take on any more burdens. That’s what smokers do. We evade. We take time-outs. At the height of an intense experience, we say, “I need five minutes.” That’s what keeps us young. We separate ourselves from the rest of the world. We bitch and moan. We blame everyone else. It’s very immature. No matter what it looks like, a cigarette break is not a time for honest contemplation. Nicotine points us in the opposite direction of fear, which is always the laziest way to go. Until last year, I’d smoke in the courtyard and play Candy Crush whenever I felt overwhelmed or bored or tired, and I’d think, I don’t have to do anything that makes me uncomfortable. In fact, I mustn’t. I should listen to my instinct for self-preservation and just keep smoking.
What makes smokers cool is not the disregard for our own mortality. It’s our willingness to entertain delusions. Some delusions can be helpful. They can lead us to new ideas, new forms, new philosophies. And other delusions can be toxic. I knew that smoking would kill me, but I clung to it in part because it made me feel that I would live forever. And that cognitive dissonance made me very uncomfortable. For the length of every smoke break, I told myself, Who’s to say I won’t be the first person on earth to live forever? I went pretty far out in my need to excuse my dependency on nicotine. I’m still not sure I want to part with all of my delusional arrogance, but when I quit smoking last December, it was not because I didn’t want to die; it was because I no longer wished to be immortal. I’m no less anxious now that I don’t smoke, but I can relate to my peers more sincerely. They’re all anxious, it turns out. They’re all kind of weird and confused. And that seems perfectly normal, considering how insane the world looks right now. I suppose that this is adulthood: When what is strange and unreasonable about your personality finds a place to sit in the land of common ideas, you are no longer a child.
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