Michael Was Ready

Michael Roike quit smoking January 2nd, 2009 and is featured in our first Out to Quit ad campaign. When you're ready to quit smoking, we're ready to help. Michael writes:

I picked up my first cigarette when I was 8 years old. My babysitter at the time smoked and offered me one to try. Of course I coughed and felt like I was going to die, but little did I know that it would spark an addiction in me.

Over the years I would have the random cigarette here and there, usually pilfered from someone's grandma or from the "bad kids" after school. I truly started to smoke in earnest during my sophmore year in high school. I don't want to lay blame, but my best friend Jessica was a smoker and she made them readily available through her father who would actually buy us cigarettes because we were too young to do it ourselves.

I started smoking to be cool. To fit in with a group of kids that I thought were the coolest kids ever. We would smoke before school while waiting at the bus stop. Or on the way to school if our friend Jason drove us. Everyone I hung out with on a daily basis was a smoker all through high school. I started with Marlboro Reds, then switched to Camel Light Menthols, then back to Reds all before I graduated. The thing I looked foward to the most wasn't necessarily college or graduating High School, I couldn't wait to be 18 so I could buy smokes whenever I wanted!

When I got to college, my roomate smoked. So in order to make it easier and cheaper for us, we both smoked Marlboro Milds. Again, the story of being cool and fitting in and making friends throough smoking. I was new, it was my first time away from home, I was newly 18 years old and felt like I could do anything.

It was now past the novelty part and well into addiction. I had a schedule, if you will. Wake up, smoke. Take shower, smoke. Walk to class while smoking. After class, smoke. Eat lunch, smoke. After class, smoke. After class, smoke. Eat dinner, smoke. Do homework while smoking. Hang out with friends while smoking. Smoke pot, smoke. Get the munchies, smoke. Get ready to go to bed, smoke. Sleep. Wake up, smoke.

My parents hated the fact that I smoked. Every holiday my mother would give me lectures and my father would have loads of dissapproving stares to give out. Friends told me I stinked. Boyfriends were wary to kiss me without mints. My clothes and house reeked. But I couldn't stop. At this point I had given up Marlboros and was on to better more tasty things called Newports.

I smoked Newports for four years until I started coughing blood.

Did I quit smoking then? Hell no, I just gave up menthol cold turkey and started smoke Marlboro Mediums. I always said I would quit. When my throat hurt in the morning, or when a boyfriend did not like it. If I was out of money, or when the price went above $5.00. But I was just lying to myself. I wasn't going to quit until I damn well felt like it, which seemed like never.

Cigarettes got me through the hard times in life. Working on a show is stressful and it doesn't help when most everyone in the theatre business smokes. Or I would justify smoking when I moved from place to place by claiming that it helped me fit in. In reality, I was just alienating myself from another group, the non smokers.

When I lived with Andy, we tried to quit. But I knew deep down that I didn't want to. We read books and tried to support each other. I made it three days! But the urge was too much and I didn't really WANT to quit. Well, now I have met the man of my dreams. We will get married one day. Yet, he and I have different ideas of what a relationship is. I am very tradtitional and monogomous, while he leans towards neither of those things.

We were having quite a long discussion about this one day when I just grew tired of it. I held my cigarettes over a garbage can and I told him, "If you remain monogomous with me the entirety of our time together, I will throw these cigarettes away right now and never smoke again." He agreed (he hated that I smoked), the Marlboro Mediums went into the trash can and I haven't looked back since.