#mapacho

And as for me, as the clock strikes midnight and one year gives way to another, I will keep my feet on the ground and my eyes toward the sky, and I will place my hand on my beating heart. And I will breathe.

And it will be a new year, but there will be no new me. No lists of ideals that I wish I could be. It took a long time to get here — to learn how to love myself in this skin. And as I peel back the layers of everything I'm not, I realize that I like the person I am. Me. Just me. Imperfect and flawed but beautiful and worthy of love. And I will honor the journey that's brought me here today. I will find peace in my own being. I will not spend my entire life chasing my worthiness like it's always just out of reach. Because I know I can find it here. Right here. In my body. In my breath.

And as a new year comes, I have no grand resolutions.

No bold proclamations about who I will become.

My last work 🙃

DON'T DO AS I DID What's this? Well, it's actually known as mapacho, or if you are in Vietnam, thuoc lao. This is where I tested it, and it is a cautionary tale.

As I walked the streets of Hanoi I noticed groups of men openly smoking from huge bamboo pipes. You can put two and two together here, and the outcome was that I was hit for six: I felt dizzy, like I was going to faint. I felt nausea coming on. I felt extremely ill, as I gasped for fresh air.  Eventually I recovered into a sedated sort of clarity, but it was awful.

Its formal name is nicotiana rustica, and its nicotine content is about 20x that of normal tobacco, presenting the risk of acute poisoning and even death.

I made a series of mistakes with this one, and got away with it. If you ever encounter anything like it (and I include Rapé in this), don't do as I did.

For the record, to the Vietnamese chaps I was just a crazy tourist, and they had seen it all before. They knew what to expect and they guided me back to normality.