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.

Uppers and Downers

The world is full of uppers and downers. No, I'm not talking about illegal drugs, although they do fit into those categories. I'm talking about things we encounter or do everyday. There are things that bring you "up": coffee, laughter, music with a fast beat, lights etc. There are things that brings you "down": quiet, darkness, soothing music, alcohol. They can be different for one person than another. As I progressed through my time quitting smoking, I started to become more sensitive to these things. I started to realize that it was the "ups" that were what drew me back to smoking. This didn't make any sense to me. In my mind, nicotine was an "upper".

It is interesting how certain conversations stick with you and make a lasting impression. I was talking to a friend (a fellow smoker) in college about smoking. I was still a pretty casual smoker but I remember telling him that I found smoking relaxing. He had a shocked look on his face and said that smoking energized him. Blindly, I thought "well, he must be right". From then on, I thought I smoked because I was tired, lethargic. This blind faith is a whole other issue, but again, this was my reality. I trusted someone else to tell me how I felt.

It never again crossed my mind that I smoked to relax. That is, until I stopped. But even then, I had to go through several cycles of stopping and starting before I started to grasp the concept of smoking to relax. Not to say that there weren't occasions that I smoked as an "upper". But, by and large, I smoked to relax. That is how talented nicotine is. It can serve as both an "upper" and "downer". This is the beast with which I struggle with. The struggle I still have today is how do I stay in the middle.