...I had my last cigarette.
It seems somehow ironic that I had to call in sick today with a cold, but sometimes life's like that.
One full year without even a drag off a cigarette. Even after the fact, it seems so unlikely.
Thankfully, smoking itself is starting to seem unlikely. My life as someone who doesn't smoke is starting to normalize itself. Stress is still a bit of a monster; just the other day at work I was having a big problem and all I could thing was, "This is when I would have gone for a cigarette. What the heck do I do instead?" It wasn't even that I wanted to smoke. I just really didn't know what to do instead of smoking. Went for a walk, had some tea; it was all fine.
That's what it's all about, really, in the end. This quitting business is all about re-learning how to live through totally commonplace events in the absence of cigarettes. Waking up. Drinking coffee. Walking outside. Chatting with friends. Having a beer. These are all things that have nothing to do with smoking now, and never did, really, except that my addiction-addled brain had some wires crossed. I gave nothing up by quitting smoking, and gained back my life.
It was hard, SO hard, but finally I used that difficulty as a tool to help me past it. I had always had it backwards, you see. I had associated quitting smoking with withdrawal.
It kind of went like this:
quitting = withdrawal
withdrawal = pain
pain = bad
quitting = bad
Small wonder I couldn't quit, eh? Math doesn't lie, my friends, and there was the evidence. And so I would safely return to smoking again as soon as the withdrawal started to eat me.
Then, around 350 days ago, about a week into my last quit, I had an epiphany. I finally realized that while my logic path was fine, my base assumption was wrong. It wasn't quitting that caused withdrawal, it was smoking. As a smoker, I was going through withdrawal all the time! It made me go outside in the wind and the rain and the snow either to smoke or buy more cigarettes; sent me to the pack and lighter, at the height of my addiction, up to 75 times a day. This was caused by smoking. This was withdrawal.
So now I had:
smoking = withdrawal
withdrawal = pain
pain = bad
smoking = bad
And what did that say about this fierce, terrible, wracking pain that I was going through, this withdrawal. It said that the only way out was through. If I gave in to the withdrawal, I wasn't making it go away, I was simply agreeing to turn it down a bit and live with it in my life every day. But withdrawal was a fierce, terrible, wracking pain that I was going through! How could I simply make peace with a terrible thing like that and accept it in my life every single waking moment? Even if it was turned down to a "tolerable" level. I couldn't.
No more. The only way for withdrawal to go away was not to smoke. And so I used the fierce, terrible, wracking pain to my advantage. The only way out is through this. The only way out is through this. The only way out is through this. And boy, do I ever need to get out.
And so I got out, in the end, and here I am today, withdrawal-free. It was a torturous journey at times, and I still might wonder about how I'm supposed to fill a moment that had always, for more than twenty years, been filled with a cigarette, but I'm here, and it was all worth it. Quitnet was one of the best ways to fill many, so many, of those moments, and my thanks go out to everyone there.
For those who once smoked and are now living withdrawal-free, congratulations. I know some of what you went through to get here; welcome and keep the quit.
For those still fighting the battle, please remember, the only way out is through. You CAN do it. Even I did it, and boy, am I ever glad I did.
Posted by Ken Allen at March 31, 2004 8:26 AM