How Hard Can It Be to Quit Smoking? | by Ceren | Nov, 2025
Do you smoke?
If you do, what’s your story of how you started?
If you don’t, would you like to know what the feeling of quitting truly causes?
Everyone who starts smoking has a story. And everyone takes refuge in their own story. This is mine:
I never liked cigarettes as a kid. In high school, when my friends offered, the smell bothered me. I didn’t even want to be in the same environment. How could I have turned something I disliked so much into a repetitive cycle, every 2 hours, for 11 years of my life? Good question.
I started smoking at university, exactly at age 19. It was the first time I had experienced people I loved and valued suddenly leaving my life. This shouldn’t be an excuse, I know that. But I couldn’t control my emotions. I wasn’t talking to anyone, staying in a dorm where I knew no one. I was so young. The foundation of my dreams had collapsed, and I didn’t know how to rebuild. When that situation combined with the insecurity from my childhood, I was pulled into the deep despair of darkness.
There were voids in my head I couldn’t fill. I had trouble sleeping, and when I did, I’d wake up from nightmares.
We stayed in 4-person dorm rooms. When I woke up from nightmares in the middle of the night, I’d go to the fire escape for air, and I’d see peers my age smoking. When they saw I didn’t smoke, they would offer me one from their pack. Though I said “I don’t smoke” at first, the fact that the only hand extended in my loneliness every night was one offering a cigarette became the reason I forced my body to get used to it, hating it all the while.
I used to be someone who smoked a pack a day. I speak in the past tense because, as of today, I have the identity of a non-smoker.
It’s the morning hours right now. I feel a weight in my head, an intense tension. It’s as if an unseen force is squeezing my head. I feel this pressure in my eye sockets. I’m frowning involuntarily. I feel the weight down to the roots of my eyelashes.
I can describe it as a paper cut. Not lethal, but incredibly uncomfortable.
I can’t focus. I’m getting lost in my thoughts, staring into space. I’m eating whatever I can get my hands on. I feel the headache ease a little while I’m eating and drinking. That’s why I started chewing gum.
As I write my own story, I feel sorry for my youth. I’m angry at the people I thought I loved. I’m angry at myself.
I know that if I have one cigarette right now, all of this will pass. I’ll experience a slight numbness and dizziness. My furrowed brow will relax, I’ll feel nauseous, my heart rhythm will be disrupted, and I’ll want to lie down. I’ll be relaxed until the next nicotine crisis. Then, the same cycle all over again.
It turns out, a person’s greatest enemy is themselves. I understand this now, looking back at events years later. The ones you think will never leave, leave; the ones you think would never do it, do; the ones you think would never say it, say… At the end of the day, you are all you have.
I started to get tired. I realized no one else mattered when I began to destroy my own dignity and life with my own words. I realized I was- ignoring the mistakes made against me, despite caring for the people I thought I loved. I always looked for faults in myself. I pushed myself too hard to be perfect.
In the end, they moved on with their lives. I, on the other hand, got stuck in a life that didn’t feel like my own, taking refuge in cigarettes. I also grew to love smoking, as if with every puff, I was blowing my anxieties into the air.
I never wanted to quit smoking for my health. I can go and buy a pack right now. But I want to break the cycle — this time, for myself.
I’m in the second month of staying home and having quit my job. In this time, I’ve started reading books. I opened a digital store and am learning about AI. I also signed up for a motorcycle license course. After this period, I will go job hunting. I have one month left.
It’s a good amount of time to quit smoking, isn’t it?
