I think I may have been 9 or 10 when I smoked my first cigarette. It was with a friend of mine in the neighborhood who stole some cigarettes and a lighter from his dad and we, and a couple of other friends, each smoked a cigarette in the local neighborhood park. I felt so sick that I thought I was going to throw up. It was a truly disgusting experience.
I did not smoke again (despite having smoking friends in high school) until my first weekend in college when I smoked my second cigarette. Maybe it was the freedom of being away from my parents or some belief that it made me feel part of the crowd but I slowly started smoking "socially" my first year in college.
I went home that summer after my first year in college and did not smoke a single cigarette. But within a month of coming back to college my second year, I was buying packs of cigarettes and smoking on a regular basis.
Never set out to become a nicotine addict but it happened. I smoked for 20 years.
In the early days, I knew a lot of smokers (although I had a lot of non-smoking friends who tried to discourage me from smoking) but in my last years as a smoker, I felt a lot more isolated. What was once a "social" thing became an "anti-social" thing as the smokers I knew I driefted awayfrom or just quit.
For me, maybe what I quoted from Cbdave is accurate. In the beginninng, it felt like a social thinng but in the end, it felt like a solitary thing.
