Giving up smoking

I gave up smoking cigarettes nearly 12 months ago.  Now I miss it.  I won't start smoking again, of course.  Why go through all that pain just to have to go through it again another day?  I am hoping that talking about what I am feeling makes it easier stay on the path of not smoking 


Though this last time I gave up smoking wasn't that painful at all.  There were four days of not feeling so lovely and being a little tense and then those feelings went away and I was left with a disappointed feeling that it, smoking, left me so easily this time.  


This is not a sign that I can resume smoking as it is so easy to give up!!  This says to me that it was time to let it go.  The previous times I gave up smoking were awful and seriously do not trust my luck that it would be easy again.


When visiting down south I felt like a pariah as a smoker.  Rightly so, it is smelly and dirty before we go onto any health issues.  Speaking of which, my daughter is studying medicine and the medical facts of why I shouldn't smoke weren't mentioned very often but.........

When did I start smoking cigarettes?  There was the time as a rebellious teenager that I smoked, menthols at that.  Peer group pressure - other girls were experimenting with smoking and so I joined in.  


There was something very risque about pooling our money and one of us going into the milkbar after school and buying a packet of cigarettes.  Sitting in the park smoking later I remember feeling very grown up.  We were not simply anonymous schoolgirls any more.   We were pushing the boundary of what we were allowed to do.  We were sophisticated women - or so we thought at the tender age of 15. 




That first time smoking did not last long.  I left school and it was no longer necessary to prove that I was not a schoolgirl any more.  I wasn't.  Anyway, life was far to busy and fun to spend time smoking.

A little later there was another experimental time.  It was the early 70's and the world was a beautiful place to be in.  We could do anything, anything at all.  There were few boundaries in our small world that we didn't push at in an attempt to batter them down.  


No, that is incorrect.  Really thinking back to that time, I did not realise that there were barriers there.  That didn't come until several years later.  At that moment there was just a hell of a lot of things to do in life, places to go to, people to meet.  And experimenting with substances was one of the things that was there to try.  We did and came through it and out the other side relatively unscathed.



The next flirtation with smoking was living in Germany in late 1976 as a young wife and mother.  For an Australian woman on her first trip overseas, at that time I did not have the life experience to communicate my feelings of being boxed in and expected to act in a certain way.  So I smoked hand-rolled Cuban cigarillos and they were fun.   As I stopped smoking as soon as we returned to Australia six months later, smoking these cigarillos was purely a release for me from the stifling lifestyle that was Germany at the moment in time.


The next step on my smoking career, if I can call it that, wasn't until I arrived in Darwin in 1993.  Again I was being rebellious, doing the things that I had not been doing in the previous 18 years because of the lifestyle that I had chosen.  It was again a time to experiment, to find out who I was and what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it.  


Now, 17 years after arriving in Darwin I am smoke free for nearly the last one and hopefully will not smoke again.  But I miss smoking.  I miss rolling a cigarette.  I miss the time out it gave me when I went outside to have a smoke. 


Okay, I don't miss emptying dirty ashtrays.  I don't miss the mess in my handbag with bits of tobacco and filters rolling around the bottom no matter how careful I was.  There are more books on my shelves which I have treated myself with from the money not gone up in smoke.  I notice the smell of cigarettes when I walk out of a building and say thank you that smokers have been moved from straight outside the doors to way down the street.  It is an awful smell to come across, it really does assault my nostrils.


Maybe this is just another of those moments when I realise that I might be growing up.  I have chosen to take something out of my life which wasn't a positive influence.  Now, to do that with other areas.......


(With apologies to the ducks for taking over their spot for a moment.  Though smoked duck is very, very good)