A personal blog about building strength, femininity, and mental health.

This is a personal story about how I became sober after having a serious addiction to smoking cigarettes. I had to battle so many self esteem issues, impatience issues, and mental health issues that at the time that I was ready to start quitting, it was much harder for me than that of an average person especially in this day and age where smoking is banned in public restaurants and many public spaces. In the 1960s, also called the Cigarette Century, you couldn’t escape smoking, men and women were smoking everywhere and it was an accepted habit, so even having the inkling to quit smoking at that time would have probably also been quite difficult just because it was everywhere. I wasn’t living in the 1960s, I was a 27 year old woman with a huge mental problem that couldn’t seem to stop smoking even though everyone around her didn’t smoke.

I started smoking cigarettes soon after I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder at 27 years old. As I started showing symptoms, such as delusional thinking and hearing auditory hallucinations, I could feel myself having a huge array of emotions. My boyfriend caught me talking in the bathroom to nobody and him and my family realized they had caught one of my schizophrenic episodes. Everything that went on in my head didn’t make sense to other people, yet somehow it could make perfect sense to him. Soon afterwards, as I was going through a panic stage, where I felt like everything was buzzing around me and my energy was so high that I felt like I needed anything to calm down, I decided to buy a pack of cigarettes to see if they would help me relax. The first cigarette that I smoked made me feel so pleasurable and calm that I soon got hooked. Even though the effect was never the same after that, it still brought me comfort and ill conceived joy. However, my addiction started getting out of control, for awhile I was smoking a pack a day, everything around me just seemed to drain my energy and I thought that a cigarette was the answer to everything, but in fact it was the cigarette that was draining my energy. Once I realized that, I started struggling with depression because of trying to quit and failing so many times. The amount I smoked scared me, but it didn’t stop me from smoking, sometimes I’d even gag or throw up from too much nicotine in my system. If I was trying to quit but felt that need for a cigarette, I’d even search the trash for half smoked ones, or quarter ones, in my desperate need to fill that craving of smoking. Slowly but surely I started having days where I didn’t smoke or I’d only smoke a couple, even then when I was supposed to be proud of myself, I wasn’t and I didn’t know why. I think my schizoaffective disorder made it more difficult for me to quit because my brain is wired to self criticize, to lack self esteem, and to be emotionally masochistic. So how did I quit? What a good question.