On the evening of April 8th, 2016, I smoked my last cigarette. It was the 20th cigarette of the second pack that day.

With the exception of the period from November 1999 to November 2003, I had been a regular smoker since around the time I turned 19 in 1992, averaging two to three packs a day in my later smoking years.

I quit in 2016 the same way I quit the first time in 1999: cold turkey. I had finished my last pack and decided not to buy another. That was it and that was all. No programs, no scheduled cutgdowns, no counseling, and no support groups. Just a decision I made in a moment of time.

I smoked much less frequently back when I commuted my way through college in Irbid, Jordan in the mid- to late 1990s, averaging two to three cigarettes a day. Sometimes I would go smoke-free for days at a time; other times I’d be going through a pack in a day or two.

That average gradually increased into the regular two to three packs a day after I abandoned cycling altogether and moved to Jordan’s capital Amman for my first reporting job about a year after having graduated. It didn’t help that absolutely everyone in the newsroom smoked heavily AF.

It was around the tail end of that job that I realized the error of my ways and quit cold turkey for the first time.
Fast forward to late 2003. I had just moved to Saudi Arabia for another job in journalism. Some of the people around me were the same people I had worked with in Amman. To their credit, though, serial smokers as they were, they did try to keep me from taking the habit up again.

A lot of the reasons why I took smoking back up in 2003 were similar to the reasons why I took it up in 1992: peer pressure, low self-esteem and wanting to fit in – but with a few key differences: unlike in 1992, by 2003 I was much more financially independent, which went a long way to embolden me to be more assertive about my habits, both the good and the bad.

Another difference is that the urge to take up smoking as a form of self-destroying escapism was compounded by feelings of homesickness and anxiety about future prospects in a foreign country.

A third motivator was that in Saudi Arabia, we could buy and “enjoy” the original, genuine versions of our favorite brands, in lieu of the locally produced (and licensed) knockoffs we had to endure in Jordan.


After I got back into cycling in 2015, I quickly realized – again – what I had known all along: I couldn’t smoke and be active at the same time. The choice I made that Friday evening was an easy one.