FINDING STILLNESS IN CHAOS
“Do you smoke?” he asks, the flick of his lighter emphasizes the stillness of the alleyway. The smell of tobacco blends with the city’s cool air. I nod, replaying the first time I inhaled the poison just a few months ago in high school.
A lot can change in two months; now I’m a 15-year-old naive kid in college. I’m sure he sees how new I am to this. But I stay calm and pretend there isn’t a chaos of flavors in my mouth. I smile and pretend there isn’t chaos.
Staring at the pack of cigarettes on my desk, the familiar chaos returns 15 years later in Japan. The memory loops through my mind, just as vivid. But this time around, it brought a different kind of chaos.
After over a decade of nicotine addiction, it was as if I finally hit my head and woke up to the harsh truth—smoking made me feel worse. Yet I had convinced myself it tamed the most depressing moments of living abroad.
I clung to my addiction like a crutch, offering familiarity in a place that never felt like home. Like the naive kid in college, I denied it was the habit’s familiarity that made me feel less overwhelmed.
I smoked in the morning with my coffee, like I used to back home. I smoked after every meal, just as I always had. And alcohol always came with it, just as it did in my youth.
Somehow, the habit of repeating the same actions brought a sense of connection to what I had just left behind: the world I had known and the comfort of knowing I was still the same person since I hopped on the plane in October 2021.
I wasn’t. Inside, I was worse.
The lingering pains of 2020 took hold of me. They didn’t blend well with culture shock and the mental strains of the Japanese workplace. Never in my life have I felt the world was closing in on me. How could a dream to better my and my family’s life end up like my worst decision?
Each day, I dragged myself out of bed. I dreaded going to work—having to face the reality that I had let go of my tenure and the best years of my career for something that never lived up to the same level of fulfillment.
The position made me feel worthless. Something I thought I’d never face again. Through it and the people I had to deal with, I developed a strong resentment to live. This chaos. This infinite chaos only I understood. It hovered over me, a cloak of darkness that kept me from truly experiencing the meaning of my new life.
I turned to my love for music and writing which have been there all along. But I also have taken my love for drinking and smoking to a whole new level. I allowed myself to be around toxic people and disregarded my mental well-being. All of which dimmed whatever ounce of positivity I had left in my body. Slowly but surely.
Slowly but surely I succumbed into a phase of mediocrity. It dragged on for months on end until I finally got exhausted. It wasn’t a tragic moment that pushed me to change—it was the exhaustion of letting the waves of darkness consume me and leave me helpless.
It was the realization that I was back in my 2020 dark hole. Only this time I dragged myself way deeper. I’d crawl into bed intoxicated on work nights, any chance I got I’d smoke. And then I wondered why I couldn’t completely move on.
In a desperate attempt to save myself from spiraling further into loneliness and frustration, I decided to confront my vices. Alcohol and nicotine were both depressants. I had to learn how to detach from them.
I watched YouTube videos, I read books, I kept writing, and I learned to create music. I stumbled upon a book called, “The Easy Way to Stop Smoking” by Allen Carr. And it opened my eyes to the start of countless defining moments.
Nobody was coming to save me; I had to save myself.
One October night in 2022, I lit a cigarette. And I vowed it would be my last. From then on, my life has improved tenfold.
Cigarettes no longer greet me in the morning. There’s music and words and a brighter perspective.
It took one vow.
To this day, I’ve kept that vow.
To this day, I find stillness in all the chaos.