Two years smoke free

I can remember the first cigarette I ever smoked. It was 1983 and on my way to art foundation one day, I stopped my car at Kettering railway station and bought a packet of ten Benson & Hedges and a box of Swan matches. I pulled on the cellophane band, tore off the top and flipped open the golden box. I’ll never forget the smell of tobacco that rises from a freshly opened pack or the bitter smell of a match. I slipped a cigarette between my lips, struck a match and lit it.


My family didn’t smoke so I didn’t learn by example. I didn’t start smoking because I went to parties where my friends smoked. I wasn’t a casual, social smoker who’s habit took hold. My beginning to smoke was deliberate, rebellious and self-destructive.

Twenty-seven years later, I stood, as I had done so many times before, at my open office door. It was past midnight and I picked the last Marlboro from the pack, lit it from a red disposable lighter — over the years I’d developed a superstition for only using red lighters — and smoked it to the butt. As I flicked it into a flower bed, I knew it would be the last cigarette I ever smoked.

That was two years ago, today.

As someone who’d smoked twenty-plus cigarettes a day for more than half my life, I’d thought that giving up smoking would be hard. It had been before.

I’d ‘given up’ several times, for days and weeks and months, but I hadn’t become a non-smoker because — although it was a nasty, expensive habit that my family hated and asked me stop many times — I hadn’t wanted to give it up.

No quitting aids could help me, no patches, no gum, no drugs, not even hypnosis. They were all useless because, in my mind, I was being asked to stop doing something I wanted to do. My rebellious self resurfaced and quitting had no chance against it.

(My one and only experience with hypnosis still makes me smile. As I laid on the couch with my eyes closed, listening to the therapist guide me deeper, Jeffrey Zeldman’s face popped into my mind and wouldn’t go away. I walked out of the therapist’s office and into the shop next door to buy twenty Marlboro.)

This time would be different because I wasn’t giving up something I liked and wanted, I stopping doing something that I no longer wanted to do.

From the moment I flicked that mental switch, the habit of twenty-seven years was broken and beyond the first few days of physical withdrawal and the first few months of behaviour adjustment, stopping has been easy.

There are times when, after a meal or late in the evening when I would’ve smoked, my smokers’ past comes back to haunt me, but it’s gone as quickly as it came.

There’s what’s likely a billion dollar industry based on telling people that nicotine is more addictive than heroin and that quitting smoking is hard, if not impossible to do without help from expensive aids. The truth is, if you no longer want to do something, not doing it is easy.

It’s also true that no amount of persuasion from family or lectures from health professionals or government will stop a smoker from smoking. What I needed was to decide for myself that smoking cigarettes was no longer rebellious, that my self-destructive behaviour needed to stop. That was as much a deliberate decision as starting to smoke almost thirty years ago.


 
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