Well, so far I have. Thirteen days.

It’s been difficult because cigarettes and crazy people are made for each other. Smoking feels good when you’re manic because it’s calming. It feels good when you’re depressed because it’s stimulating.  It fills the reward centers of your brain with dopamine–something you don’t have a whole lot of if you’re crazy. You don’t need a prescription for cigarettes, even with the taxes they’re way cheaper than Ambien, and you get twenty little friends in a convenient flip-top box unless only the soft packs are left.

When I was inpatient I discovered that despite the variety in the ward–we were men and women, we were old and young, we were different races and religions, we had different conditions and symptoms–we all liked smoking. Several of us skipped “fresh-air break” because it’s not worth standing on a cement porch watching traffic for fifteen minutes if you don’t get to smoke. Instead we lined up at the nurses’ station for nicotine gum after our dinner trays.  My mom slipped me some extra on a visit, and I cultivated a distribution network.

Now gum is all I have. I chew it furiously at regular intervals. It makes me hyper and gives me gas, and even twelve days in I’m still coughing like a slot jockey at Binion’s Horseshoe. But chewing gum is actually a pleasant vehicle for drugs; it sure tastes better than Prozac.