Happy Saturday night, Ex'ers. The Happy quitter, checking in because I haven't been here for a while. One of the things that those of you who know me understand is that I really do love milestones, and this is a rather unique one. I have a counter that sends me emails about my quit, and many days I don't even look at it anymore, but I did look at todays email and lo and behold, it's been 1200 days since I quit, I've saved $9,000 from not smoking 36,000 cigarettes and I've added 9 months to my life. Every single number is exact zero's. I don't think that's happened before, but there's a beautiful symmetry to it.
It's been a long and strange winter. It's the middle of April and we finally got a couple of beautiful spring days, but while we were in the 80's today here in Northern Virginia, in the mid-west it's been snowing like crazy! And we're going down about 30 degrees or more by Tuesday. My sister lives in Pittsburgh and they're expecting snow on Tuesday.
To all of the newbies here who have no idea who I am I smoked for 53 years (pretty heavily) and I'm lucky I still have lungs. I quit a little over three years ago with the help of this wonderful community. I know I will never smoke another cigarette. When you see I've not smoked for 1200 days you're probably thinking "yeah, but it was probably easy for her." No, it wasn't easy, because I had to disentangle smoking from every single aspect of my life. I smoked when I was happy; I smoked when I was sad. I smoked when I was healthy; I smoked when I was sick. I smoked when I was lonely; I smoked when I was in a crowd. For the better part of 53 years I was either smoking, thinking about smoking, planning for smoking or trying to sneak in a little more smoking. Talking on the phone, driving the car, with coffee in the morning and adult beverages at night. To help me concentrate, to help me unwind . . . I could go on and on. What I figured out at the beginning of this quit was that the agony I was anticipating in giving up what I thought -- like so many smokers do -- was my best friend was just the discomfort of untangling those connections. Oh, believe me, I had my moments when that little sneaky smoker who lives in my brain tried to cajole me into thinking she was telling me the truth when she said "have a smoke, you'll feel better." Turns out that's nothing but "fake news."
The elders here regularly will guide you through this somewhat tricky but very doable process, and the quitters just ahead of you will help immeasurably as well. You're on the right track and you can definitely make this your forever quit.
