As I continue on with my path to freedom I at times become baffled by many things. At times it’s hard to understand what’s going on inside when I’m in the middle of my quit. I find many ways to understand the internal conflict. I find many ways to deal with the fact that though I’m a nonsmoker, I still have a little ways to go. This becomes evident every time I get an urge, mainly because I know the urges are no longer a physical manifestation. It’s just something that I must fight within myself.
This is what makes support so important. If I simply wanted to understand the facts of quitting, I would go to a medical web site and look up the "facts that are related to quitting". If I didn’t already know that the best way to quit is simply not to put a cigarette in my mouth, then I never would have been able to quit in the first place. I mean really. There is more to quitting then just the science of it.
There’s also the emotional side. The part that can’t be jotted down in a medical journal or pasted to a bulletin board for all to see. This is what a support community is all about. Dealing with that part of quitting that cannot be written in stone. It’s about picking someone up when they fall and helping them back to the path that they really want to complete anyway.
It’s about dealing with the part of quitting that cannot be written in a book or rammed down the throat. The part that we cannot see. The part that lives inside of all of us. The part that is different for all of us.
It’s the individual experiences that we find here that make this site so great. As we continue to report our observations about our quit to each other, it helps all who are a part of the community including the one who is blogging. In some ways, it helps another to see things a little differently then they might have seen things before thus allowing them to continue on the path to freedom. There is no single good or bad comment so long as it relates to the task at hand which in this case is quitting an addiction.
There is no good or bad observation when we are trying to quit because the things that we learn might be beneficial to another even if the observation is not based on the science of quitting. If a community reaches the point where some will not blog because of fear of what their peers might think, then the power of support is diminished. The idea of a community of like minded people helping each other to achieve a common goal becomes a fallacy because so many who might have been helped simply slip through the cracks.
This is why I will always share my thoughts about how I feel, what I discover along the path to freedom and how I’m personally achieving my goal even if what I say is not based on science or the simple facts involved with quitting. After all, I already knew most of the facts. I simply came here to live this hell we call quitting smoking with others who are going through the same things.
The power of the many is here. It is real and it’s something that may indeed save many a life simply because we all care. We all feel the same things and we all share those things with each other, gaining momentum for ourselves as well as helping another to gain their momentum so that one day we can all say we did it. We did it together and we did it with a kind of compassion that can only come from a support web site.
It’s the science of quitting that we can read about but it’s the power of the many that can help others to achieve what might at first seem like an unachievable goal. And now I continue onward to my personal freedom. After all, it’s what I came here for . . .
