When I was a kid, my movie and TV idols were all heavy smokers. Even my father and my elder brothers were smokers. So I started to smoke, too: the cigarette made me feel taller, more mature, more importantly, bigger.
My first pocket money is literally ended up on smoke.
In those days you were unaware of the serious harm of smoking that, not infrequently, leads to death.
Later, in London, I also met other methods and other substances to smoke. I never really went on search of it, but it happened by chance.
Hindsight I think I would avoid even that kind of smoke: it distorts reality, creating emotions, sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly, but a man has within himself everything, without having to resort to external substances.
I also speak of alcoholic substances, which are dangerous too, especially if perceived as an aid to overcome difficult situations or to find a pleasure. I do not make an ideological issue of it, or worse, a fundamentalist crusade, indeed. But I want to say that smoke is dangerous and it's to avoid.
There are now so many methods to help people to stop smoking.
I stopped by force of will, without manuals and without method. But that depends on my training, from my way of being: I always had to do everything myself (well, almost everything, in fact).
I do not make a boast on it, and indeed I regret writing it. If I could go back, I probably would open more to others, confessing my weaknesses, asking for help, without lock myself into my pride, in my shyness, in my fears; but every man is forged in the environment which he lives in and while he's in the waves of life, he looks for a way to survive without too much rationalism, in an instinctive way.
I am the sixth of eleven children: I found myself in the middle, between older brothers who had to think about themselves and younger siblings whom I have tried to give protection and good example. My parents have been two great persons ( mother is still alive; father has left too long ago), being an example and a reference point, without being oppressive and intrusive (but how could they have been it, even if they wanted?) and they have always left us free to choose.
Never the less, I personally testify that the fight against smoking might need an external help. No more people should die any more for active smoking, and even less for passive smoking.
Help is needed because the battle against smoking is really difficult to fight.
For two years, after stop smoking, I dreamed of smoking and woke up sweating in the middle of the night, regretting my stupidity to have started smoking again, and when I discovered that he had just been a dream, I fell asleep again, happy not to have fall back in the coils of the terrible vice.
Never mind if I'm, after having stopped smoking, fattened twenty pounds (I was an anchovy, when I smoked, I am now a salmon, although not smoked), but it is better this way!
And furthermore I know people who have quit smoking without even fatter than a pound.
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