[ Post a Response | The Sublime Desire of Cigarette Smoking ]
Posted by M G F (&v) on November 23, 2008, 6:40 pm
Message modified by board administrator November 27, 2008, 11:47 pm
Well done! Looking back at my own experience and desire to start smoking, I believe that one of my strongest motivations was to break out of the good little girl life I was leading. I think that is one of the stronger, but more unacknowledged, motivations for all smokers to start. I wonder, though, to what extent is it a motivation to continue, particularly with smoking at an all time low of social acceptability. So much of a smoker's self and public identity is that she is a smoker.
A few years ago a colleague quit smoking after more than 35 years. At age 50 or 51, she had begun to develop some health problems and the only way to address them effectively was for her to quit. Several months after she quit, we were chatting and I asked how she was coping with not being a smoker. The parts of her reply that struck me were that 1) She had been alarmed by the extent of the damage she had done as evidenced by the changes she had experienced after quitting, 2) When she finally had gone a month without a cigarette and believed that she had really quit, she had been saddened "Like part of me had died, like I wasn't me anymore."
Her health has improved significantly and she has far more stamina now than I would have ever predicted. She still smokes from time to time -- a cigarette or two with friends at the end of a particularly stressful week, for example. The last time she smoked when a group of us went out, she lit up and, after exhaling a lungful of smoke, exclaimed "GOD it feels good to be bad again!" I understood completely.
V notes: Just added the image link. Thanks M G F! 
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