Inside My Head

• About a third of the male adult global population smokes.
• Smoking related diseases kills one in ten adults worldwide, in other words, it causes 4 million deaths.
• If these current trends continue, by 2030, one in six people will die from smoke related deaths.
• Someone dies from tobacco use every eight seconds.
• 10 million cigarettes are sold every minute.
• Between 80,000 and 100,000 children worldwide start smoking every day.
• In teenagers ages 13 to 15 worldwide, about one in five smokes.

Scared yet? Chances are if you’re a non-smoker, you’re flabbergasted by these numbers, but if you’re a hardcore smoker, you’re probably just lighting up. Honestly, that used to be me, the hardcore smoker. I could watch those truth commercials, and those commercials where 300 hearses would drive to the cemetery and every grave was for a smoker without even flinching. No matter how many cold, hard facts I could hear about smoking, secondhand smoke, and just how many people couldn’t stand the air that I breathed because it was filled with smoke, I could not be stopped. I write this now, for one reason alone…I quit.

Yes, after years of actually inhaling, I put my black and milds down. Granted, my “spectacular” feat only happened a week ago, but that’s still a week I haven’t lit up. Honestly, for anyone who is contemplating it, it’s not easy at all! I sometimes find myself holding my pen like a cigar, and even going so far as to puff on it, and from there, I deeply inhale the “smoke” before I finally let out a relaxed and satisfied exhale. Now take into consideration that my dad smoked from his teenage years up until his fifties and he only quit then because he developed emphysema which ended his life a couple of years later. His two brothers, my uncles, passed away from lung cancer, but even with this knowledge, I held fast to my fixation. Crazy isn’t it, but in every addiction lies a bit of madness. So if I didn’t quit because of family history, what finally ended my craving? No, it wasn’t the constant nagging from family because sometimes I smoked just to spite them. I have thought about all the smoking statistics, but even knowing that smoking can kill you, some people right now are still dying to smoke. The reason I finally gave up my habit is because I gave up my excuses to do it. I used to smoke because people would upset me, because I got full from eating, because I was taking a long drive and sometimes I’d smoke just because I “had” to have a cigar. Now of course it’s hard for me not to smoke and there are some who think that my “non smoking hell” is a bit ridiculous, but I’ve learned that one person’s mountain of a problem is only a molehill to someone else. Yes, people still upset me and I still drive, but every day my will gets a little stronger, and every day I find a new reason not to smoke simply because I am the reason I quit.

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