my first non-art post ever, but it’s important so …
today is my 4-year anniversary of quitting smoking. wahhoooo!!
i remember the day quite well …. i was doing some (northern-hemisphere) summer cleaning and washing all my blankets, wall fabrics, bedsheets, all jackets, bathrobe, and etc. since i was such a heavy smoker and smoked in my house, all things in my house stunk quite a lot. i had been trying (unsuccessfully) to quit smoking for years, each attempt left me so angry that i decided to smoke rather than be so angry. i had told myself that i would quit smoking when i returned from europe (on 3 july of that year) and when the day came, i really truly forgot! so, here i was, 18 days later, washing nearly every single thing i owned and scrubbing the entire house even window sills and as i was walking up the steep stairs carrying another load of clean clothes back up to fold, i realized “i only have 4 cigs left”. before i finished climbing the stairs (only one flight of stairs mind you), i had decided “ok, i’ll just go smoke them now and that’ll be the end of it”. and that’s precisely what i did.
i went out on my porch, smoked my 4 cigs straight in a row, getting that oh-so-familiar feeling of nicotine poisoning. (this wasn’t a new feeling for me. each time i tried to quit smoking in the past, i was under some impression that if i made myself sick from cigs the day before, that the following day i wouldn’t want to smoke. let me tell you now, it didn’t work. not only did it not work, but it backfired. because i would end up smoking even more than i did before trying to quit that time. so at times i was smoking nearly 1.5-2 packs of cigs a day! yuck!) after that 4th cig, i emptied & cleaned the ashtrays, cleaned the porch, took the trash out, folded another load or two of laundry, and glued my a$$ to the couch. i watched three movies starting around 5pm and ending when i was nearly deliriously tired. but i didn’t smoke.
for the next 30 days, i promised myself that i could succumb to ANY craving i had – anything was better in the short term than a cigarette. my friends were soooooo supportive – i remember one week in particular when a different friend picked me up every evening and we would go get frozen custard (yeah Ted Drewes!). (frozen custard every day for a week certainly isn’t what the food pyramid suggests, but in the short term, it’s so much better than smoking!) in those first 30 days, i watched lots of movies, ate lots of onion rings and frozen custard, and didn’t hang out with smoking friends. after the 30 days, life returned to normal, except i didn’t go outside every hour during the day for a 5-min break.
the best part about quitting smoking this time was that i wasn’t angry at all. i was certainly a bit out of it for a little while (i attribute it to all that extra oxygen my brain wasn’t used to!), but you can get used to anything.
i still mourn the absence of cigarettes in my life. and at times, i actually miss smoking – there’s nothing better than going to a dark dingy coffee shop, finding a quiet table in the corner, pulling out a good novel, and exhaling as you relax back into the chair. today i think it’s the smell that really makes me STAY quit. even tho i miss the sexiness, i hope i never go back (and so does my fiance!).
and after all this, i am still so excited to get back to drawing and guitar. more soon!
