Cigarettes as a replacement to friendship

First of all let me make this clear, I am not endorsing this idea in any way. This is just my little rant.

If in case this one gets longer than I initially planned, there will be a tl;dr at the end.

I never thought I would turn out this way. Even though my exams are at their peak right now, I still couldn’t shake this thing from my head and had to make a full rant about it for some probably ocd-ish reason. This wasn’t the me I was visualizing as a child. In fact I never had a vision of future me as a kid. People as younglings apparently have this rough idea of what kind of person they want to be as they grow up but I never could give it a thought. Even when I would consciously want to think about that, all that would come to mind is “thulo manxe banne ho”. Nothing more, no willingness to think further. And no I wasn’t the “live in the present” kind of person either. Now that I look back in retrospect, I was essentially devoid of the whole concept of time. I was neither living in the present, nor thinking about later, and I definitely don’t remember much about my past because I’ve been so absentminded throughout my childhood. Currently I can’t even wrap my head around how my thought process would have been as a kid. All I have as “memories” are the marksheets that say I got 95 or whatever percentages in elementary grade but I don’t remember shit about all those years. It’s to a point where I’m inclining towards a belief that I have dementia of some kind.

But leaving that part of the story, I am here now. Doing undergrad in whatever subject I could get my name out in, without having a clear desire in anything at all. At the end of grade 12, I was given two choices; well there was only one but I could decide to not take the choice. The choice was made by literally everyone around me. My studies had led me to this point. A decent SEE grade along with a +2 in Bio could only mean one thing: MBBS. But that was probably when I started to get a grip on myself. Where was I? What was I doing all along? The realization finally hit me that I was so far behind everyone. When I talked to my the-then colleagues in grade 12 about what they’d do right after, they’d have an effortless answer at their disposal but I’d have to take a pause to think but then make something up my arse because I sincerely had no clue. When presented with the only option, I started thinking, researching possible career options and all but nothing got me intrigued at all. I started to imagine what life would be like if I studied MBBS. I couldn’t see myself being able to handle the heat. So I looked at the only relevant alternative (at least to the Nepali eye), engineering.

Despite not actually having a clear interest in anything, I could at least dampen the horrors of my would-be future as a doctor, whose weight of profession I as a person, am not built to withstand, or so I thought, I’d never know at least. I probably even asked here in this subreddit about which of the new options to choose. I couldn’t give a thought to going abroad though. I saw a ton of my classmates, childhood friends and basically 50% of who I know of my generation, just fly soon after +2 ended. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was too scared. I couldn’t convince my family even if I tried. I wasn’t mature enough, not ready by far. So I stayed. Maybe in the next 4 years I will be ready, is what I said to myself.

Maybe in the next 4 years, I would build myself a support system to be able to sustain outside. Maybe I’d garner enough of the skills I lack to finally fit in with the international standards. Maybe I would have a robust network by the end of those years whom I could rely on in case I had some turmoil.

I had never tried alcohol before grade 11, and by the end of that grade, I tried it for the first time, and I didn’t drink my second glass until 1 year later. Maybe that was just me opening up. Liquor was an idea I had not rejected even as a kid, well a teen. With classmates, we’d talk about how alcohol is fine, sometimes hookah isn’t too bad but never in my life will I pick up a cigarette. And everyone agreed back then. Perhaps I was the only one who broke that vow, maybe everyone did. I’m not in touch with them as much currently to know the real answer to that. But after grade 12 ended and it was time for me to join the preparation classes for medical entrance, I had my first puff. If it was your friends whose company made you do such you would call it “peer pressure” but for me I had my first one with one of my relatives. So let’s call it “blood pressure”. Quirky, I know.

And off I headed to the capital of Nepal, and by some luck and will, I stayed with the same relative during my time there, since they were already doing a course in a college in ktm. During that time, I had become a regular. At some point during the beginning, I remember myself counting the number of cigs I would take because I didn’t want that number to cross 100 in my life or something. I had only taken it up as a form of recreation. But soon the company I had turned it into an addiction. The engineering and medical entrances went by and surely, my rank in both would lean me towards engineering. In the very first week, I had found a circle to smoke in. At this point I hadn’t realized and maybe I even wasn’t addicted. I’d have a cig once every few days and sometimes go weeks without any. Even in my whole first year, I didn’t average more than 2/3 per week. But as I entered the second, holy shit. I can’t even remember at what point I started keeping packets upon packets in my room because somehow I needed to burn one before I went to sleep. What was an entirely social event for me had suddenly become my friend in the darkness. At 1/2 am right before sleep, after getting the hit I would finally be able to sleep like a log. Before the second year, it was a medium for me to socialize which would normally be not possible, even more so with me lacking so many essential interpersonal skills of communication, empathy, charm and reliability. I liked that about the occasional smokes, that it would create some bondings.

Now at this time and stage, I have been thrown back to the ground with the same lack of intimacy with anyone, an overarching feeling of being left alone all the while having a long paper stick in my hand that seems to rid me of all those thoughts for some minutes and help me calm down. It doesn’t talk to me. It certainly doesn’t listen to me, but it does exactly what I want it to do. Give me the warmth that I’ve now starting to believe I’m incapable of experiencing from somewhere else. And it does that because I set it on fire. It feels like I’m a sadist when we try to personify a cig but I don’t have schizophrenia so that wouldn’t bother me much. It feels like it has become my cane without me realizing anything. At what point did I turn into this person? Was I always like this?

I’m going home after exams end, and I won’t have these things in my hands as frequently when I’m there but I can’t believe I turned from this person who used to hate the smell of smoke with passion, and every single person who took up a cig, to a person whose day is not complete without it. Sooner or later I will get rid of this, but the bigger issue here is a lack of social skills and this utter manifestation of a 0 EQ being lagging behind everyone in every aspect of life.

This friendship will break too, just like everything else before. But with all said and done, I see a very grim walk of life ahead. This makes me even more scared of going out of country than I was when I finished +2.

Wow I didn’t think it would be this long. Guess I just went with a stream instead of just the flow.

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TL;DR: Used to hate smoking and smokers, started having puffs to improve social life, now the only friend I have is this piece of paper with crushed dried leaves inside. Will it always be this way?

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