Smoking or chain-smoking?

You know how they say smoking kills? And how every cigarette pack comes with a dire FDA warning about lung cancer or some other morbid health topic smokers don’t want to know about ? And how it’s been common knowledge for years that smoking shortens your life expectancy? And how smokers can no longer smoke in most indoor places and even many outdoor ones? And how the price of a pack of cigarettes has gotten insanely high in recent years? And how badly a person who just stepped out to smoke stinks when they come back inside? And how smokers are now the worst of society’s pariahs? So what kind of idiot would continue to smoke in this day and age? Me, until 78 days ago. And frankly, I quit for the shallowest of reasons.

I started smoking when I was 18. And stopped at 50 — a total of 32 fragrant years. When I took up smoking, people smoked pretty much anywhere they wanted to. In fact, places you couldn’t smoke were fairly rare: schools, churches — actually, those may have been the only places where smoking was taboo. Watch TV shows from the 60s and 70s and you can see doctors consulting with patients while they suck on cigarettes.

The last time I tried to quit was 25 years ago. I have no idea what the impetus was but I remember telling the people in my office I was quitting. The first day I felt sleepy and ditzy and crabby. The second day, the office secretary (who also smoked) told me if I couldn’t stop being so bitchy, she was going to buy me a carton of cigarettes. That quit lasted a few days. When I bought a used car from a guy on the far west side of town, I stopped at a convenience store and bought a pack of cigarettes to christen the car on the long drive home. And I didn’t try to quit again until a couple of months ago.

Why did I finally quit smoking? Was it because of a health scare? Or did I simply come to my senses about the risks of continuing such an unhealthy habit? Brace yourself for a confession of pettiness: I quit out of spite. When my former husband quit, several months before he moved out of the house, he had also been losing weight, had bought new clothes and started lifting weights. After he moved out, I spent several months smoking more than usual. I started losing weight but only because I’d lost my appetite. Then I needed to buy clothes since mine no longer fit me. The next thing I knew, I was thinking I needed to quit smoking. I thought of my former husband and every jerk I’d ever known who used to smoke but had quit successfully. So it became a competition to me: if those losers can quit and stay quit, so could I. If someone has a pettier, shallower reason for giving up cigarettes, I’d like to know what it is.

Oh, sure, I enjoy not being a smoker immensely. I feel great. I have boundless energy and I smell much better. There have been some unpleasant gastrointestinal side effects I hadn’t expected but overall, it’s been fabulous with a capital FAB. And incredibly easy. How is that possible? That’s a story for another day.