That is how I started and Quit Smoking!! Candid acceptance - Anupam

Inception of this habit goes to the day when I wrapped dried Croton leaves in a piece of paper and went to roof of my home to taste it. One of my friends told me that it will taste great and you will feel good, I acted on the words of him and smoked my first homemade cigarette. Then I didn’t smoke again until the mid nineties.

I was in my graduation and was into a habit of wandering here and there in my city, as it was once an Estate so a lot of things one can explore there. I made some new friends and was invited to attend a marriage function in a village very far from the city and there was a dense forest on the way to the place. Just before the day of function I left with my friend on a Scooter he was riding. After attending the ceremony we decided to leave the place to our home. It was very beginning of January 95 or 96 can’t remember exactly. We decided to leave in the morning and left the place by 6 AM. Very soon we started feeling cold when we were reaching to the Forest. Then I started riding the scooter and soon I also realized that we haven’t made a good decision we both were shivering badly. The moment my friend noticed a cigarette shop half opened. We went there and bought few cigarettes. We sat there on a wall of a miner and started to smoke, both smoked all the cigarettes leaving two in the packet.

 This gave us the enough warmth and we moved on to our home. We didn’t feel that much cold as we felt before smoking the cigarettes. Though I am not sure that was it due to cigarette or our mind had believed that we are not feeling cold, I can’t say exactly. And within an hour we reached our respective homes.

From that moment I started smoking in real sense. I started from one and increased up to 12 in a day by then I had come to Lucknow and joined a marketing Company. The Number had been increasing month by months and in 2003-2004 I was smoking 30+ cigarettes per day.

I tried to quit smoking twice in between but one resolution lasted for a month and the other was for Six months, and I was again on the other side of the smoking Shit.

 But 31^st December 2004 was the day when I finally quit smoking.

In the beginning of that day it was not in my mind to quit smoke and I enjoyed the day and was having dinner at the Cozy Corner in the late evening, after dinner I lit my Cigarette and went to a nearby shed to smoke when It was just half smoked I put that at the rising corner of that shed and said to that cigarette “I am going forward in time, (as it was only few minutes away from the arrival of a new year), and you can never find me as I am leaving you in this time” and I had moved on. And from that day I didn’t smoke until the pulling of an emotional trigger in 2007, but I smoked only two cigarettes that day. So after quitting the habit of smoking in 2004 to present, I just smoked two cigarettes on the very same day in 2007. It urged a lot of times but I never gave it a chance to be in my life again. And that is how I Quit smoking. Did You?

-Anupam