How Can One Keck the Smoking Habit?

Abstract

Several years ago when I was a first-year middle school student and encouraged by some schoolmates who were smokers, I began to smoke in secret after school behind the backs of my parents and teachers. After a while, I became addicted to smoking; it was unbearable if I could not have a few cigarettes every day. I am a middle school student, where can I find money to buy cigarettes? At first I stole my father's cigarettes to smoke. Later I was afraid that my father might discover this. I began stealing money from my mother's pocket to buy cigarettes. But just as fire cannot be wrapped in paper, at last my parents and my teachers discovered my smoking habit. My mother scolded me. My teachers reasoned with me. People around me looked down at me because they said that at such a young age I already had a cigarette hanging from my lips and looked like a hoodlum. I felt very much alone. I thought I'd better stop smoking. But my smoker friends laughed at me and ridiculed me as being too timid; they said, "Without smoking where is a man's masculinity?" Thus, my resolve to give up smoking was again shaken.