Have you ever seen those commercials on television that show you the horrors of cigarettes? I know I have and honestly, as much as I wish the people who are still smoking would pay attention to them, sadly most of them won’t. How do I know this? Because I used to smoke and I remember how powerful that addiction was when I was doing it.
It’s probably best that I clarify something right off the bat first. I’m not writing this entry to convince you to stop smoking if you happened to be one of those 1.1 billion people who still do. I’m just writing this to tell you a little about the years I myself was hooked on them.
The first time I ever actually smoked a cigarette was on a hot summer night when I had been drinking alcohol pretty heavily. I was hanging out with a guy I was secretly smitten with and I thought I’d impress him by trying one. After pulling out one of the Newport menthols from his pack and lighting it, I tried to hold it in my mouth like he did and then inhaled. Like all those movies and television shows that often portray what happens when a person first tries to smoke a cigarette, I began to cough and gag uncontrollably. But I was determined to be more like this guy, hoping somehow it would draw me closer to him. Little did I know though that the only thing it would draw me closer to is an unhealthy life? Needless to say, once I got past those initial problems, its effect on me was electric. Not only did it give me a buzz and a sense of ease and comfort, it also enhanced the effect of all the booze I was beginning to consume in greater and greater quantities.
For a while I’d only smoke when I was drinking and I’d often tell myself I wasn’t addicted to cigarettes because of this. I’d usually only consume maybe five or six throughout an entire evening while I drank, but the thought of doing them the next morning when I awoke was initially never there. In fact the smell of them on the two fingers I used to smoke the night before, as well as all over my clothes and pretty much the rest of my body, totally repulsed me at first. But as I grew more restless, irritable, and discontent with my life, I found that I wanted to get more of that ease and comfort during the day when I wasn’t able to drink. I found I could get a little of that by smoking a cigarette after lunch and after dinner. Soon it became one of those things I had to do after every meal or I just didn’t feel relaxed and complete.
Then came the stress from various aspects of my day-to-day living. At this point in my life, I was in college and deeply closeted. Cigarettes began to offer me some relaxation either before or after big exams, or while hanging out with someone I was attracted to but couldn’t admit to it. Eventually, it felt as if everything else there started to get to me as well, like traffic around campus for example. The more I became stuck in it, the more smoking a cigarette seemed to help me deal with it somehow. Then I noticed I had problems moving my bowels in the morning, but smoking a cigarette always corrected that somehow. And just like that, cigarettes soon became my answer for all of life’s problems.
Like any addiction, the bad effects of this growing habit didn’t happen right away. The first negative thing from doing it didn’t really occur until a few years down the road when I began to easily get winded while playing sports. My stamina in turn then became less and less the more I kept on smoking. Soon my white teeth started becoming really yellow and my breath more and more foul, and then I began to go through regular episodes of bronchitis.
Yet I continued to do this habit and would even try to enhance the buzz at times by using chewing tobacco, which was definitely a sign of this growing addition. But one day when I lit up a cigarette as always and inhaled the first puff, something happened. My throat spontaneously closed, almost as if it was attempting to reject the nicotine all on its own. I’d try several more times to inhale the smoke and only got the same exact result. Unfortunately, I was completely oblivious to the notion my body was trying to send me a warning message to kick the habit. Instead, I kept on doing it, finding ways to distract my mind so that I could override the constant strange throat reaction and inhale the smoke.
When I began suffering from serious anxiety and depression and found that cigarettes (and alcohol) were only making it, and the rest of my health worse, I knew I needed to do something. That’s when I sought a Higher Power for help through a humble prayer on my knees. The result was swift when the compulsion to do both was immediately lifted. I truly consider myself one of the lucky ones these days because of this. I have seen plenty of the horrors that an addiction to smoking cigarettes ultimately leads to, from COPD, to heart disease, to high cholesterol, to poor vision, and of course many forms of cancer. I knew most of this when I used to smoke yet I kept on doing it.
You see that’s the problem with all addictions. Once a person finds some ease and comfort from the substance of any addiction, it becomes next to impossible to have any desire to stop doing it until the pain and suffering gets great enough from actually doing it. This is why anyone who is a prisoner to smoking isn’t ever going to give much mind to all those commercials on television that constantly show people on breathing apparatus, or having lost limbs or parts of their face, or even the ones lately that are trying to cater to the young crowd by showing a pack of cigarettes come alive like one of those creatures from the Alien movie series.
That’s why I feel it’s so sad that 1 in 3 adults on our planet continue to engage in a habit that could eventually destroy their mind and body and possibly even take their life the more they do it. I have plenty of friends totally addicted to cigarettes that constantly tell me they plan to quit, but the reality is they won’t until something really bad happens. Hopefully each of them and anyone else suffering from this addiction will one day wake up like I did and ask their Higher Power to guide them away from something that’s so deadly.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson