Today is another milestone on my journey into a totally tobacco free life. I actually woke up from a dream, in which I found a spare cigarette in my bag and smoked it. It felt good and I didn't feel as guilty, considering I wasn't aware that I was dreaming.
The first two weeks were the hardest, and it became somewhat easier during the third week. I have been a social smoker for years, one here one there, and I have always enjoyed the act but not the taste, which prevented me from being a regular. About six months ago, I found an excuse to carry my own pack. At first, I only smoked when I felt like. You know, having a sip of wine at home, joining a smoker friend on a smoke break at a bar, the usual. Then I realized lighting one became a habit when I felt angry or sad, which, at that point in my life, was a little more frequent than desired.
After a few months of "no i'm not a regular smoker" denials, I finally went ahead and purchased my first ashtray for home. My empty deposit bottles sighed collectively.
Then a friend at work and yours truly started enabling each other a little too much at work. Once a day smoke breaks became almost four times a day.
The day I saw my third and biggest ashtray all full with a small mountain of cigarette butts, I decided this wasn't going well.
First I said, I am not addicted, I can probably quit much more easily than many. I mean, come on, I've been smoking for only a few months. So one day, when I was especially grossed out by the smell of an ashtray, I said, OK, I'll just not smoke another one. I'm not going to announce it to my friends either because it's not even that big of a deal. I didn't light one up the next morning, I didn't smoke one when we had our smoke breaks with the enabler friend of mine, but when I came home that evening.. by then I was so used to reaching over the coffee table and grabbing a pack and a lighter, it just happened.
So I said, well, maybe I'll just smoke a little bit more. My friend smiled at me knowingly the next day outside our building on our smoke break.
He tried quitting several times, with all the works, the patches, the programs.. everything. He has been a smoker for much much longer. So when he came to me and said, I'm quitting on the 15th of this month, I realized this was the time. I'd feel ashamed if I didn't join him on his resolution, and this way it would be much easier. It's a pact, you know, when one of us is weak the other will be strong; when one really really wants to smoke, badly, the other one will say no, no matter how strong the temptation is.
So we went out on the night of 14th to celebrate our pact. We drank, we had our regular smoke breaks out in the freezing cold in front of the bar, where Ann Arborites looked at us in disgust. After our last sip of delicious beer, we smoked our last cig, gave the remaining of the packs and our lighters to a friend of ours, and went home. No more smoking.
For me it's not a biological addiction. It's the act of lighting up one. In the mornings it gave me a quiet 10 minutes of doing nothing. At home it would be my reward breaks for getting things done. But more importantly, it went incredibly well with alcohol. The first two days were ok, but from day 3 on, it was horrible. If I had one spare cigarette with me I would have given up right then and there. Thank God I'm a lazy bum and I won't get out and drive a mile just to buy a pack of smokes, not in this weather anyways.
The worst was when I got mad at something. I was so used to grabbing a smoke in a moment of fury, to vent it off, kind of. It worked the same way when I was depressed, when I was longing the days gone... whenever I was emotionally tipped over. I got used to everything, but this one still requires active, purposeful resistance on my part.
One day I had a long, vivid, kind of warm kind of weird dream that had nothing to do about smoking. However, close to the end, I saw my friend who had quit with me, smoking. I was shocked and sad when he told me he went back and started smoking again.
The next day at work, while doing some mind-numbing task, I recited my dream. A day later, he confessed to me that he had sneaked one cigarette that very morning, while I was still sleeping. It had freaked him out that I had actually dreamed about it at almost the exact time. It kind of freaked me out too.
So after a couple of weeks after this event and about a week of being MIA over the holidays, I saw him again yesterday. He had been smoking.
Shoot. All this time whenever I wanted to smoke, it was always "well he is not smoking, I can't break our pact." So, what now?
The evening got worse as I found myself making this an excuse for me to smoke. I had to get out of the house. I met a few friends at my local bar, enjoyed myself, forgot about smoking. Or so I thought.
Then I had this dream, where the same people were out at the same bar, and I found a cigarette in my black hole of a bag, and I smoked it.
Mmmm it was good.
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