A New Direction

As I progressed through this journey of quitting, I had to face a lot of assumptions that really weren't true. This is a large part of why I wanted to write the blog. I was so frustrated because society kept telling me that to quit smoking I needed to do two things. 1) Get over the physical addiction to nicotine and 2) Break the routine of smoking. For some people, that's really all there is. If I heard one more person tell me "I just decided one day to quit. I just threw the cigarettes away and never looked back". (Profanity Alert) Well fuck you!!! That was not MY experience. I've thrown away hundreds of dollars in cigarettes. Why did I keep starting again??? Every time I quit and then started again I felt there was something more to all this.

The something more was that I self-medicated with nicotine. It was my "fix". It was my "downer". There were a lot of things I didn't really know about myself until I tried to stop taking my "downer". I started to face the reality that I had pretty severe anxiety. But no..."I am a pretty chilled, laid back person. Aren't I???" "Oh God, maybe I'm not!!!" I am feeling frantic...gotta do something. I was soooo confused.

What am I? Who am I? Talk about midlife crisis. And I was only in my 30's. I was trying to put all this together and I knew this would be the missing piece that I needed to figure out to quit successfully. As I sat with the reality of my anxiety, a lot of things started to make sense. I mean A LOT of things started to make sense.

So, the focus of my quitting changed. Yes, I still needed to do those two things I mentioned before (that was the easy part) but now I had to figure out how to replace nicotine. To replace the anti-anxiety effect that nicotine had on my body. Now my journey took a new direction.