I was 46 years old when I quit, and smoked for 37 years before I quit....

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I was 46 years old when I quit, and smoked for 37 years before I quit. Both my parents smoked, while she was pregnant my mom was actually told by her freaking DOCTOR to have "a cig or 2 to relax you" (!) Anyway, I got pneumonia all the time as a baby and at 3 years old I was diagnosed with asthma. Before I had an inhaler, my parents used to sit me up in the big recliner downstairs and make me drink cups of strong black coffee whenever I had an attack. They smoked in the house, in the car, really everywhere. This was the 70's so you still could.I didn't have my first cigarette until I was 9, but when I was 7 or so I can remember trying to make one out of some drawing paper and some leaves I picked from the backyard. I lit it with the matches that were always easy to come by and tried to smoke it...as I recall it didn't work very well, the leaves being green. (Probably peppermint, now that I think about it, it grew everywhere around our house.) I started stealing cigs from my parents packs at 9, I would go up in the woods behind our house and just smoke one right after the other until they were gone. It went on like this until I was 15 and got a job at a drugstore.At the drug store, we sold cigarettes. I wasn't old enough to buy them, or even to sell them (I had to get a coworker to ring them up), but I made friends with an older smoking coworker of mine and she was more than happy to buy them for me. I smoked like a chimney at work, and in the woods at home, but never at school.At my high school, we had what we called "the smoker's shack" and it was seriously a covered place ON SCHOOL GROUNDS where students could smoke. I didn't go to it though, for 2 reasons: Smoking was becoming more socially unacceptable. Everybody called the people who hung out in the shack stoners and losers...but even then I might have done it except for the fact that my mom taught at my school and I didn't want her to catch me. This went on until I left for college.I went to college in L.A., where it was REALLY unacceptable to smoke...so I mostly just smoked at home at night or in my car in between stuff I was doing. This was actually the period in my life where I smoked the least, and was exposed to the least amount of smoke in my environment. Ah, if only I had given it up then...But I didn't. I smoked and I smoked. I smoked (just a cig or 2!) while I was pregnant, I smoked in places you weren't supposed to smoke (nobody will know if I blow my smoke into this towel here in my grandmother's bathroom), I would wake up in the middle of the night to smoke. It was ALWAYS the first thing I did when I woke up and the last thing I did before bed...even after brushing my teeth.

My why is similar to Cathy's. I wasn't having health problems,  I smoked cheap tobacco in a pipe so the money wasn't an issue, but one night in December, after being a serial quitter for years,  standing in the freezing cold darkness I realized. I don't want to do this anymore.  I don't want to be a paying slave to big tobacco anymore, even at $2 a week. So I tossed my nearly full pouch and haven't looked back. I suffer from schizoaffective,  bipolar type,  and CPTSD, and the rate of smoking for those groups is very high,  but I don't want to be a statistic anymore. So I am here. Some days are still bad. But never smokers have bad days too. So I stay quit.  You should too.

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