I’ve never taken up smoking. When we were younger my brother and I, at my parents’ encouragement, would relentlessly bully my uncle into quitting via a whole manner of creative tortures: “No Smoking” signs recreated from Magnetix as he walked in the door; graphic stories about a man tragically dying of lung cancer with accompanying visuals of tar-blackened lungs and yellowed fingers; pressing our faces against the window in mock hysterics as he smoked a solitary cigarette by the firepit, coughing loudly and dramatically holding our noses as he came back inside. It worked, eventually. He doesn’t smoke anymore. (He claims hypnotherapy helped him quit. I maintain it was the Lego display).
This instilled in me a firm belief that smoking was simply not an option. A chance encounter with a weed laced cigarette on a cool night in Amsterdam many years later only confirmed this and, as I hunched over a hostel bathroom gripping my toothbrush and drink bottle for dear life, vomiting the nicotine out of my body with a force that was almost frightening, I came to accept that smoking cigarettes would never be for me. Maybe it’s for the best. Despite being almost 22 years old, living out of home for over 3 years, paying my own rent and making my own decisions, I can’t shake the feeling that my parents would be more than a little disappointed.
“My generation doesn’t smoke” was always the narrative. Whilst my parents joked about getting caught smoking behind the bike sheds as kids, our high school scandals were always about who got caught vaping in the bathrooms and whether we’d ever actually get those smoke detectors they kept threatening to install. Vaping was new and cool and mysterious, but cigarettes were decidedly out of fashion. The D.A.R.E.-style fearmongering and the packaging emblazoned with rotting teeth and gangrenous skin were deterrent enough. How wrong I was.
It turns out that university life, or at least the circles I travel in, are far more based around smoking than I ever anticipated. In the way that all trends inevitably make a comeback, it seemed that amongst my peers smoking a cigarette was the most chic and intellectual thing you could possibly do. I felt like I was in a 90s movie. Smoking is cool again? Why did no one tell me? When did everyone grow up, and why did I get left behind?
I felt betrayed. Whilst I was never the life of the party, my bright-eyed, over-achieving, extra-curricular obsessed year 12 self assumed that making friends at university would be a breeze. That was what uni was all about; finding your people, growing into your new identity and flaunting it like your favourite pair of jeans. Little did I know the depths you can sink to in the living room of a stranger’s Newtown sharehouse. I learnt the hard way that staying inside at a house party whilst everyone heads out for a smoke is a uniquely agonising experience. The intensely awkward small talk you make with the disinterested strangers on the couch across from you whilst you wait for your friends to return is enough to make you want to risk the lung cancer after all.
There’s only so many times you can pretend to be interested in someone’s political economy major when your eyelids are heavy from consuming nothing but a slightly warm beer and a handful of stale chips all night, while a friend of a friend of a friend who’s an aspiring DJ spins a bass-heavy club remix from a rattling speaker. By the time you decide to just get up and join the smokers outside, they’ve already locked into some inside joke that you can never catch up on. They never quite expand the circle wide enough to let you in, so you stand there with your arms crossed, one foot in the circle, saying nothing. You try a joke, but the conversation has already moved on. You head back inside. Grab another drink. Pretend to check your phone. After an eternity the smokers traipse back inside, and you know you’ve got twenty, maybe twenty-five minutes before you’re left alone on the couch again.
It began to sting, how easy it seemed for everyone else. I felt childish as I followed my friends outside, a child at the adult’s table, unable to participate in the big kid activities but unable to hold my own in a conversation with strangers. It was a mystery to me how offering someone a light meant you were bonded for life. I watched cigarettes bring people together, whilst I slipped to the bathroom for the fourth time in a single night to berate myself in the mirror for being the weirdest person alive. I watched my boyfriend effortlessly slide into my friendship group via a skinny blueberry menthol, happy he was fitting in so well, but envious, even if I didn’t want to admit it, at how easy it was for him.
This insecurity only grew when I began solo travelling, leaving the country for weeks at a time and coming back with no friends, often going days on end without having a real conversation with anyone. I jealously listened as my friends recounted wild nights out and impromptu day trips with their new hostel mates, wondering how it was that everybody had managed to make friends but me. “You need to smoke,” they all told me. Find someone to bum a cigarette off, and you’ve got a friend for life. I was so lonely that I considered choking down the foul tasting ash for the chance of just a smidge of human connection.
I feel it the most in student politics circles. Caucus agendas are split into pre and post-smoko discussions. Council breaks aren’t measured in minutes, but in how long it takes to roll a ciggy. Do USyd students understand how much their democracy and representation revolves around the humble cigarette?
The closest I’ve ever come to giving up my commitment to a smoke free-life was on the 2024 SRC election campaign trail. After a long, tiring day of harassing people about student unionism, it felt like a beer just wasn’t going to cut it. I needed something stronger than that. But after a couple of days clocking up steps up and down Cadigal Green, counting down the minutes until the polling booths closed, I realised that it wasn’t the cigarette I craved, but the ritual of it all.
It’s the song and dance around it that I love. The careful rolling, the search for a lighter that you swear was on the table two seconds ago, the comedy of three-quarters of the table leaving only to come back and immediately begin rolling their next cigarette. It’s the casting off of all our worries, the stresses of the day dissipating in a cloud of smoke, the way it forces us to take a step back from flyers and contests and walk and talks and take a deep breath for the first time all day. It’s a chance to stop thinking strategy, to share stupid anecdotes from the day, regale each other with tales of stubborn voters and disastrous lecture bashes with a candour that a mere drink cannot facilitate.
In my to-smoke-or-not-to-smoke crisis, I’ve learnt that more often than not, it’s okay to just stand in the circle. Sometimes you remember that second-hand smoke exists, and the group splits into two whilst the non-smokers retreat to a far away bench to silently (or, quite often, loudly) wax lyrical about our superior ability to never cave to peer pressure. But for the most part, no one really cares about whether or not you smoke, or anything else you do for that matter. The spotlight on you is all in your head. The smoker’s circle isn’t secretly laughing about you behind your back. There’s no need to stand in the bathroom at the house party feeling like a complete loser.
Smoke, don’t smoke, do what you like. But my advice; when you’re out and about, keep a lighter on you. You might just make a friend for life.
