When we make the decision to change our lives by choosing to quit smoking, it seems like an impossible task and to be honest for most of us, when we first choose to make that decision it seems like it’s an impossible task.
We spend most of our time as we’re addicted building the foundations of our addicted life. The idea being to convince ourselves that what we’re doing might possibly, maybe cause harm if we’re not careful, but also that it harms others but somehow, it won’t happen to us. We make the decision to see ourselves as happy and content simply because we have this thing always in the back of our minds like an itch that feels so good to scratch even though we know we shouldn’t be scratching it because if we keep scratching, it will eventually harm us.
And so we move on through our lives, building a world that more matches our desires rather than seeing what might be truth. And the longer we build that world of addiction on top of that foundation, the stronger it becomes.
Every time we lie to ourselves in order to remain addicted, we stab another tentacle into us and nurture it until it becomes interwoven into the very foundations of our lives. Well, that’s how it was for me at least, but I was pretty addicted.
When I saw the reality of what I was doing to myself, and I mean really saw it, I was terrified! How could I do this to myself? I looked around at those close to me, trying to find someone else to blame, but once you start seeing reality it’s harder to create new lies so I had to admit that there was no one to blame but myself.
No one else created this fake belief system that I had created. No one else lied to me and told me that bad things only happen to others. No one else put that cigarette in my mouth and lit it. No, this problem that I had spent so long enabling and strengthening with each lie that I told myself was all on me and as such, only I could get myself out of it.
This is when the thoughts began hitting me. How could I possibly do anything right without a cigarette to keep me focused? How could I live without the constant reward for every little task, that being the cigarette. The old friend. I wasn’t even sure if I could drive without a cigarette hanging out of my mouth.
That’s when I realized how strong of an addiction I’d created and nurtured. That’s when I realized that by quitting, I would be completely changing every facet of my life. I realized that it wouldn’t be easy to do on my own, so I found support here, and started building a quit plan, or rather the plans for my new foundation.
And so I spent the time I needed to spend kind of looking over the plans of the old foundation. I learned every facet that I could of that foundation because in order to build a new one without blowing up the entire house, sometimes we have to create the new one in pieces. Sometimes we have to learn about the old to create the new.
When we quit, we’re building a new foundation for our lives based on freedom rather than addiction. We’re slowly replacing the dangerous parts with more harmonious parts and at first, it’s not easy because we have to relearn each new facet of our lives. We have to force ourselves at first to see the benefits of what we’re doing for ourselves, and it’s hard because all we have to compare how we see our new world is our old lives of addiction. Our old memories of smoking.
And at these times, it’s really easy to decide that the old foundation was just fine after all. That’s why it’s such a fight at first. We just don’t have enough knowledge of how wonderful our new world will be until we spend some time there. We all have to do it. We all have to fight and scratch for our very sanity at first, and often we want to just forget it and go back to what seems normal.
But in the end so long as we stay true to ourselves, the old foundation just kind of fades away as the new one replaces it. And once our shiny new foundation is firmly anchored into place, we often wonder why we didn’t just do this in the first place because what we discover is that peace and freedom are things we rarely felt before.
And once you get there, you’ll finally understand all that our addictions had taken from our lives for so long. That new world was really always there. We just had to learn how to find it. . . .
ONWARD TO FREEDOM!!!
Chuck
