I joined EX four weeks into my quit. It was at a moment of crisis when I was about to go buy a pack of cigarettes if someone couldn’t talk me down. Ellen ( elvan) and a few others quite literally saved me that day. All the elders gave me links to tons a reading material, and I eagerly consumed it all, over the next week or so.
I loved most of it because it made so much sense to me, and really clicked. But one thing that bothered me was all the acronyms (NOPE, SINAO, NEF, etc.). I had failed in many previous quit attempts, and in my mind, I was pretty sure it was because I had been relying on gimmicks (like prescriptions and NRTs) to do the quit for me. This time I was serious. I was quitting Cold Turkey, and needed serious advice, not cutesy, gimmicky acronyms to get me thru the day.
Then I had a period with multiple waves of craving. I’d used all the tools in my toolbox, and nothing was working like it used to. You know that saying, “There are no atheists in a fox hole?” Well, I started chanting every acronym on this site over and over again like I was a friggin Gregorian Monk! I had two favorites. One was SINAO, although I changed it slightly to, “Since Smoking Is Not An Option, What Else?” That got me thru many craves. The other I made up myself. Everyone here kept praising me for teeny milestones. At first I thought it was kind of hokey, but it sure made me feel good nonetheless. So, every night as I was falling asleep, almost in disbelief that I survived another day, I rewarded myself by saying, “Yay me! (YM)” It’s silly, but many times when I was tempted to ‘quit my quit’, the thought of me not being able to say “Yay me” later, stopped me. Last night, I said it at the end of my 100th day.
Tom
100 DOF
(Yay me!)
