Among the questions I am most frequently asked is, “Have you ever thought about quitting?” and my answer is often some variation of “not really“, but I feel like the real answer is much more complicated than that. So today, I figured I’d share my more detailed thoughts on quitting.
The reality is, every single smoker thinks about quitting at some point. There are a dozen reasons to quit and only one real reason to keep smoking – because we enjoy it. Society screams at you to quit, your body screams at you to quit, your pocketbook screams at you to quit, absolutely everything screams “QUIT“. So of course, every smoker thinks about quitting and if you ever come across one who doesn’t, they are lying!
The biggest reason to quit is because smoking is an expensive habit! When I first started buying smokes, you could get a pack of 25 for under $10. Today, a pack of 20 will cost about $20. That’s a lot of damn money! The number of times I’ve been on the verge of quitting just because I didn’t have money is endless. At a minimum, 4 times a year, I consider quitting because I just can’t afford it. I’m doing the math (which is horrible, because I hate math) but that means in the almost 22 years I’ve been smoking, I’ve considered quitting at least 88 times!!!
One time, shortly after The Boyfriend and I began dating, I legitimately tried quitting. There was just no money at all for smoking. Neither of us can remember exactly how long we quit for, at least a few weeks but no more than 3 months. It was a truly dedicated effort for us both until one day, when he was at work and I was at home, at almost the exact same time, we bummed a smoke off the people we were with. We tried, we failed and we basically never tried again.
But I regularly think about quitting for other reasons, like:
- Walking up stairs and get slightly out of breath, gotta quit.
- Surrounded by people who don’t smoke, gotta quit.
- Stuck inside a building, for whatever reason, for more than an hour, gotta quit.
- Have a cold and a sore throat, gotta quit.
- Go to your doctor, for any reason, gotta quit.
Again, there are a thousand reasons to quit and I would be remiss to not at least acknowledge those. That being said, these are often fleeting thoughts followed quickly by the lighting of a cigarette…
Do I think I will quit smoking ever?
I often imagine, when I’m grown up (she says at 38…) that I’ll quit smoking. That I’ll have had enough of smoking and that my body will be begging me to quit and my doctor will give me dire warnings that will encourage me to quit and the people around me who smoke will also want to quit which will support me in my quitting determination. But that’s future-me’s problem. Right now, it’s not actively on my mind except when money is tight or in any of the scenarios I listed above.
I have been challenged by a follower to try to go some period of time without a cigarette and determine how long it takes before I start itching with a craving. How long it takes before I’m antsy and irritated and desperate to inhale and exhale the smooth creamy smoke. I postulate that it would take me exactly 30 minutes to get to that point, assuming I wasn’t in the hospital or at some other important appointment (in which case I can last up to 8 hours before getting irritable for smoking reasons).
So, to sum up: yes, I’ve thought about quitting – even tried for real once. It’s often a fleeting thought and one I have relatively frequently. Maybe one day I’ll quit, but definitely not today!
Valerie Rayne Smokes 