Smoking cigarettes.
I started really young because we learned in health class that smoking and caffeine stunt your growth. I was already taller than everyone and awkwardly hated it. So I started drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes right away.
I was eleven.
I stole one smoke every day from my mom and my neighbour friend stole one smoke a day from her mom and before school we would share one of them and after school we shared the other. I Remember how hard it was to smoke at first. It made me dizzy. And nauseous. But I was determined to stunt my growth.
By fifteen I was smoking a pack a week. I was steadily employed and smokes were less than 5$/pack. So I used to give my older sister 10$/week to buy me a pack a week. I would keep my pack at school, usually. in my locker. Unless it was the weekend. Then I would take a few cigarettes home with me in a cassette case. I liked Unfiltered Camel Lites.
By eighteen I was *buying* a pack a day but working in the bar industry when we could smoke inside, God only knows how much of that pack I was smoking versus putting down in an ashtray to later reach for it and see it was just a line of ash attached to a filter. I was smoking Player’s Light Smooth by this time.
I smoked until I had a young child copying me. Then I quit for a little while. And, somehow, I found daily smoking back in my life.
And it is, by far and large, the one behaviour I need to (and want to) let go.
I turn 40 in two months and hope to gift myself a smoke-free second half of life.
#MorningThoughts