I wasn’t exactly mentally ready yet to be able to stop; my mindset was not fully prepared to face the physiological and emotional steps to becoming a non-smoker. Becoming a non-smoker is a dramatic lifestyle change.

I asked other people who had supposedly successfully stopped smoking, and one of them suggested I try the nicotine replacement patch, which provides a source of nicotine that reduces the withdrawal symptoms in someone who stops smoking.

I went to the pharmacy where a friend of mine worked and asked him for nicotine patches. He was a bit surprised for two reasons: first, the only time he would see me there was when I was buying condoms, and secondly, he couldn’t believe that I would stop smoking. We started talking, and he asked me how many cigarettes I smoked a day, which brand I smoked, and how many milligrams of nicotine the cigarettes contained.