My Smoking History

I have always been a heavy smoker.

Not always; I lie. In the early days I wasn't. I remember walking home from school one day during Year 12, through the bushland at the back of my parents' house, bag heavy with textbooks. I remember stopping on a rock - hiding in the scrub, really - to have a cigarette before I got home, and thinking to myself: Far out, I've had seven cigarettes today. That is not good.

I wonder if that was the moment I realised it had got me, that the statement I'd been making to everyone ("I smoke, but I'm not a Smoker.") was untrue.

In the the years that followed this, it just got heavier and heavier.

At some points in my life, I smoked up to 60 a day. I'm not exaggerating. And in any serious smoking period of my life - this one included - I have never smoked less than thirty or thirty-five. This is absolutely true. I switched to rollies when I was nineteen, because I couldn't afford to smoke tailor-made cigarettes anymore. And then, after that, I started buying those hideous bags of illegal tobacco (chop-chop, they call it here), where you come out of tobacconist with a plastic bag containing an empty cigarette carton stuffed with this enormous half-kilo brick of shredded tobacco. It's all very covert; you have to wait till everyone's out of the shop to ask for it.

For many years, my heavy smoking didn't seem to effect me. Or I thought it didn't. I put the headaches down to stress and my "neck issue". I considered that I was "naturally" thin. I thought my lack of energy was due to just not being a very sporty person. I truly defined myself as a smoker - one boyfriend said that he thought of me as some kind of sassy, chain-smoking, fast-talking poet chick, and it helped - made the image of myself as a confirmed, hardcore smoker more appealing.

So I never really thought about quitting smoking, not seriously. Oh, I lasted out till eleven o' clock one day once, but it wasn't something I thought about. It was for later.

I stopped, for the first time, almost three and a half years ago, about a month after my husband and I received the sudden news that we were going to have to use IVF in order to get pregnant. The lump of paperwork they gave us at the clinic made it pretty clear that my being a smoker would effect our chances of the treatments being successful.

And I guess I wasn't prepared to mess with that.

The past three and a half years have just been an endless cycle of quitting, flirting, stopping, starting, flirting and quitting again. Some quits lasted a long time. Like I said, two of them lasted quite a long time. Not a long time in terms of one's entire life, of course, but time stretches when you're facing a quit, if you're not entirely sure you want to be. It stretches out eternally in front of you, like this bleak, unending cigarette-less existence.

Which is insane.

I used to say, a long time ago, that if I ever stopped for twenty-four hours - like if I was on a plane, for example - I would never go back to smoking. I honestly thought that that was all it would take. I didn't realise then, that it isn't the nicotine that's the biggest problem, it's what you believe about the nicotine.

I've gone 24 hours countless times since my first quit in 2006.

Whatever. Days, weeks, nothing. Quitting isn't the hard part. Allen Carr points out in his first chapter that we stop smoking every time we put a cigarette out. We are not-smoking for a large part of the day. We are not-smoking at night-time. The question then, becomes: why do we go back for each cigarette? Why do we continue to do it? What do we get out of it?

And I'm not being rhetorical. Honestly. What?