Sometime in August 2007 I quit smoking for good.
I have not smoked since. Except twice, when I was angry on a
unrelated issue and took up the Drum Mild tobacco pouch, the Rizla+
rolling papers and rolled my cigarettes, licked, then smoked.
I could not smoke after that one drag. I coughed and splutters. I
stopped right then.
I realised, my body has stopped adapting to the smoking regime. So I
threw the cigarette, the tobacco pouch and rolling papers away.
I have not smoked ever since (except for other people's second-handed
smoke in certain places which I avoided as much as possible)... all I ever
breathed in was pure fresh air, free from the clean sky. Beautiful!
Being a non-smoker, this is something I had not expected for most of
the time I was a smoker when I was compulsively addicted to the
nicotine or the act of smoking itself, or both.
I had never realised in my dreams that I would achieved the goal of
being free of the shackles of the tobacco prison. I had not expect to be
free of the lifestyle of being a smoker.
Sometimes I feel like my former life as a smoker was a bad dream,
completely separate from me, the real me who wanted to wake up and
say, "I do not smoke," yet I was a smoker and it was reality, it wasn't a
dream. It was all too real.
I spent so many years smoking without understanding why I smoke in
the first place.
I had to learn the hard way, through painful episodes of being unable
to breath, what I call the choking nightmare, choking for a breath of fresh
air while my air pipes was almost closed up tight, before I finally told
myself, "Enough is enough!"
Thus I was determined to find a way to Quit Smoking with Mental
Strength.
