This is going to be personal ... really personal!
Probably I'm sharing this mainly because it helps me remember how wrong all of this has been!
Understanding when it started and how it started, it has been a really important part of my quitting process: this type of awareness helped me understanding the real role of smoking in my life and it's helping me not feeling the need anymore.
I'm almost at the end of my first month of my quit ... the big cravings almost disappeared. Now I'm managing all my memories as a smoker and I'm training myself again that I can enjoy a lot more my life without a cigarette.
Right now all my small/big crisis are more psychological than a real need of nicotine. Now I'm starting a huge work on myself and most of the time I've been my worst enemy!!!
So ... When all Started?
I was 16 y/o and I was the typical "nerd"! Loving school, loving physics and mathematics and always at the top of my class.
Obviously the counter effect of all that: extremely lonely!
I had a couple of nerdy friends, but all the other ones in the school were (in the best case) ignoring me.
I said in the best case because I've been bullied a lot by the "cool" and famous boys in the school. Some of what they did was just a stupid joke while some other times they have been pretty bad like using my parent's house porch as their bathroom doing whatever they wanted to do!
You can imagine how it has been terrible seeing my mother cleaning all that s*** from our porch! I still remember that as one of the most humilating thing in my entire life.
When all this happened? In the mid 80s, and most of you knows that at that time smoking was still something cool!
Smoking was still a symbol of the "winners" and a symbol of "success".
Even if I knew how terrible those guys were, one of the most important thing for me at the time was to be accepted by the cool guys ... and my "crazy" solution has been start smoking: so I can be cool as well!!!
I do remember the first cigarette in the bathroom of my high school: one of the worst experience ever!!! But I didn't care ... I had to do it because I wanted really badly to be the cool one and be accepted!
So one after another I fought hard (Can you believe it???) to become a smoker and I did it!!!
Results? Have I been accepted by that gang? Did they stop bullying me? No, not at all ... they just started having fun of me also about the way I was smoking!!!
Smoking didn't solved my problem ... on the contrary it added another big issue that I had in my life for long 31 years!
I'm a grown man now. I'm not bullied anymore and on the opposite I'm a really successful man. I don't know anything about those guys at high school. I relocated and I didn't want to know anything about them anymore.
But even if I don't know anything about them, I had the clear feeling that they were still winning since they were still impacting my life being a smoker.
August 31st has been my last day as a smoker. It's my 26th day of freedom.
I didn't do it for them ... I'm doing it for myself, but every single time I have a small crisis, I'm really happy to remember that I'm winning over them now!
And I'm not open to let them win again! Never again!
I don't know if finding the real reason why you started might help you quitting as it's helping me, but I wanted to share it ... and I want to say it loud to everybody because this is making me even stronger.
All the best to all of you
Carlo
