Cigarette Smoking: What! Another Thing I Have to Give Up?

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Aug 9, 1999

So you're a smoker?

So am I, sometimes.

I started smoking, like many people, when I was a kid. Remember sneaking cigarettes from your parents...that's right...your parents smoked, didn't they? Well, at least one of them did.

I remember that my father smoked. And so did my uncle. He came over for a visit one time and I was holding my baby doll. He took his cigarette and stuck it into my doll's opened mouth, for a joke. He let me walk away with the cigarette burning in my doll's mouth. I guess it looked funny. I went into the other room, took the cigarette out of the doll's mouth and took a puff, then put it back in the doll's mouth and went back to my uncle.

I think he knew that I took a puff.

I probably smelled of tobacco. I probably looked a little green around the gills, too.

When I was a little older, my girlfriend and I discovered that we could buy cigarettes at the store for just a quarter a pack! We bought some for "our mothers" and took the pack of cigarettes home where we proceeded to try to smoke the whole pack before her mother got home and caught us!

At seventeen, my first boyfriend was a smoker. He had learned to smoke unfiltered Camels like his father did. Somehow, I was impressed. His father looked pretty old and nothing had happened to him by smoking.

I tried a Camel and then another.

Pretty soon, I was smoking with my boyfriend and continued to smoke throughout my young adult years.

Researchers tell us:
* that the act of lighting up for the first time is stimulated by desire, not thoughts or information
* that people make choices on the emotional level where desires are formed
* that information is simply used to justify the desires that have already been chosen.

When I was thirty, my husband, a smoker, decided to quit on his 30th birthday. I was raising children and getting pregnant, so I figured it was a good idea to quit, too.

For years, I didn't smoke. But I recalled enjoying the physical sensation of smoking. Every once in awhile, I would pick up a cigarette and smoke it. Then I'd smoke a few more.

I'd always quit after smoking a few cigarettes, or a few packs of cigarettes. But to this day, I'll still pick up a menthol cigarette (my favorite type) and then buy myself a pack and keep it near the computer to light up while I'm writing.

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