I was never a smoker, neither in college, nor in high pressure work environments afterwards. I was able to cope with stress and pressure just fine, without needing cigarettes in my life. I was, in fact, disgusted by the smell of smoke.

Then I started a crappy job that did a number on my mental health. It was a very toxic workplace where the work was manageable but the people were not. At the same time, I started dating a narcissist. As it happens, he love-bombed me, I fell for him hard and fast but the relationship soon got abusive. I spent a large part of that year dealing with a toxic workplace and an abusive boyfriend. That's when I found solace in smoking.

I still hated the smell, the taste and everything about it but smoking would give me a chance to take a breather. At work, standing in the balcony to smoke was the only time I could be far from the toxicity of my co-workers. At home, whenever things got too much, which they did multiple times a day, I would again use smoking as an excuse to get out of the house and get away from him. I was so poor at setting boundaries and putting my foot down that I'd used smoking as a crutch, damaging my health in return.

Then, I got fired from that job and that LVM cheated on me (blessing in disguise). I was heartbroken on account of both, yet I never felt the urge to smoke again. In the last one year since all that, I have had not more than 5 cigarettes in total. I realized that smoking was never a stress relief for me, like it is for many others. I was using it as an escape, to physically get myself out of situations and away from people that were not good for me.

I wish I had found FDS earlier. I would have never started smoking in the first place if I had known that any guy that drives me to such extremes to cope can't be good for me. I wish I knew how to set boundaries earlier, so I wouldn't have needed to cope at all.