I put in about 28 years of faithful effort. In my mid-teens I started smoking clove cigarettes (kreteks); they were fashionable at the time in the surf culture I grew up in, and they worked well as a means of covering the smell of cannabis on my breath.
After a few years I thought I'd better stop, so I switched to Drum tobacco roll ups. I reasoned that my native inability to roll a good smoke would frustrate me enough to stop smoking altogether but alas, within a week or so I was able to roll up a passable cigarette while doing eighty mph on the highway. I was now well confirmed in my habit.
Eventually I moved on to Canadian cigarettes because they had fewer chemical additives than their US counterparts, and from there to American Spirits, which were just tobacco and no additives at all, which is to say, healthy. (I imagined my still-youthful corpse being lowered into the grave while my surviving loved ones reassured one another, "It was just the tobacco.")
A couple of times in there, during my twenties, I tried to quit, but both times I spent the ensuing several weeks in a mush-brained haze, thinking about how much I wanted to stop thinking about smoking, and started again. I figured I'd quite likely never stop.
But along about 2010 I caught the swine flu (hooray!), which knocked me on my hindside and rendered me utterly unfit to smoke for a week. By the end of the week I started walking to the liquor store to get a pack of cigarettes... and realized I was on autopilot: I had no desire to smoke. So I turned around, walked home, and began a new life as a nonsmoker, which I've been ever since. (Excepting the cannabis, of course. I'm not insane.)
TWIST ENDING: When I quit having to buy cigarettes, I suddenly found myself with an extra $8+ in my pocket every day. This allowed me to stop drinking cheap beer (Schlitz and Pabst, mostly) and start buying better stuff, which I found to be much tastier. Now I drink too much. I may have abandoned the vice of smoking, but I didn't fall prey to virtue. Please tell my story.
