I smoked my first cigarette when I was twenty years old. I started late, but like many people who smoke, I don’t consider myself a smoker. I’m what some researchers have deemed a “social smoker”. I’ve probably averaged a cigarette and a half a day since I started smoking. That doesn’t sound like much, but when I multiply it over two years, it’s over a thousand cigarettes, or about 50 packs.
Smoking is a complicated, difficult, interesting and undeniably negative thing. I got bombarded with anti-smoking ads throughout my formative youth period and I never smoked until I got to college. I don’t fit the prototype of a smoker, but neither do a lot of people.
This may seem ridiculous, but I never got why people smoked before I started smoking. They smelled bad, everyone I knew who smoked smoked a pack a day, and they’re an expensive habit. The first few months I smoked, I can’t lie, it was GREAT. I’d drank plenty before, I’d smoked hookah, but I could get a buzzed, light-headed feeling in five minutes with smoking. Couple that with the social aspect - I never smoked alone, it was always with close friends and guaranteed five good minutes of conversation with no distractions. I was hooked.
Or was I? I tended to have two cigarettes a day, one before dinner, one before bed. I took weeks off at a time for the holidays and for other breaks. Some weekend nights I smoked five, sometimes I’d have five weekdays in a row where I only smoked a total of one.
This blog will catalogue various parts of smoking - why we do it, the side effects (bad and good), and my “relationship” with smoking over the past three years.
