Well, my dear friends and neighbors, tomorrow will be 100 days. I'll be officically entering the triple digits club. What a ride this has been. For those of you embarking on this wonderful journey, I'm not going to sugarcoat it for you, IT SUCKS. But if you stick with it, do your reading, see this as a nicotine addiction and not a cigarette habit, you are halfway home.
I didn't really use this site like I should have in the very beginning. I didn't faithfully track my cigarettes, I didn't set a quit date and stick to it. I came back and forth to this site at least 4 or 5 different times. I read those crazy ads for those goofy things they have out there for drops under your tongue, pills that you can take, nasal remedies, I've tried them all. I visited other sites that kept showing me pictures of damaged lungs, how smoking is bad for you, kick the habit. My response was yeah, whatever, like I don't know all that already, BUT WHY IS THIS IS HARD TO KICK??? I never found any answers anywhere. Oh, you had the books out there, for $19.95 you too can buy this and it will magically take this away. But they never really truly hit on the exact reason.
I think it's only been fairly recently (perhaps the last 5 or 10 years of so) that they have treated smoking as an addiction, an all-encompassing nicotine addiction. Cigarettes just throw in all those zillions of chemicals on top of it just for a good measure. If I would walk into an AA meeting and stand up and say, my name is Lori and I am a nicotine addict, I can imagine the looks I would get. I think that too has only been increasing with smoking support groups through some select few therapy centers. It was always Oh, it's easy, just stop smoking, it's no biggy. Well, maybe for some that didn't have an emotional need for it or developed an emotional need for it. Just like Oxycodone, nicotine is out of your system in three days. but they don't tell you about those little devils that still exist in your brain. Call them nicotine receptors, call them whatever you like, I call mine the stalkers. They wait and pounce at the right moments. My doctor once told me that smokers are just pleasure junkies. When our dopamine receptors aren't being fed, they will let us know like a 2-year-old child having a nasty tantrum. And that, my friends, goes on for months. You just have to learn to feed them in a different way.
But I've finally come to realize I need to change my old routines that I've been doing for 43 years. I need to find new hobbies or learn one. I need to start taking walks or doing gardening. I need new routines and new memories to replace the old. I need to stop doing whatever I was doing with a cigarette in my hand. Now, I don't have to worry about is there going to be a place that I can smoke. Oh, there's no ashtrays around here, and you fidget until it's time to leave so you can light up. As you can tell, today is a good day but who know what tomorrow may bring. But you know what, it doesn't matter. Come on, hit me with your best shot, I'm just getting back up again
