Education, support, and commitment are the three magic keys to freedom. You have to forgive yourself, guilt is an entirely useless emotion. I know because I carry a LOT of guilt around with me all of the time. Guilt for ever having smoked, guilt for the lost moments I cannot get back, guilt for the way I ALLOWED my body to be ravaged by tobacco, yadayadayada, blah, blah, blah. If I had not found this site I suspect I would have gone back to smoking and I seriously doubt that I would even be alive today. This is a one day at a time journey...one step at a time...sometimes they have to be baby steps and sometimes a whole day is too long and it has to be an hour or a minute or a second. The acronym that I found here that seriously saved me was NOPE, Not One Puff Ever! I said it a LOT. I tracked my cigarettes before I quit, I figured out when I smoked, wrote it down and wrote down WHY and how strong the trigger was...next to all of those triggers, I wrote down what I could do INSTEAD of smoking. I also did something I had never done before, I made a promise to myself that if I could REALLY, REALLY find a reason that smoking would help or change something in my life for the better, I would give in. It has been 3 years and close to 4 months of freedom and believe me, I have had many challenges but I KNEW that smoking would not make anything better, smoking never did in the past, why would it now? I was convinced that smoking helped my physical pain, helped me to get past stress, helped me to not feel sad or angry...the truth was and IS that it never did anything FOR me but it sure did a lot TO me. I do not want to be a smoker, I do not want to feel like something is controlling me that I have no control over. The truth is that we ALWAYS had control, we just CHOSE to give in to old ways of dealing with things. Quitting is a journey and it is not just about getting away from the cigarettes, it is also a journey to get to know ourselves. I have found out many things about myself that I did not know...I have FINALLY begun to grow up and deal with life on life's terms.
Do the reading, make yourself a quit kit, set a date, no excuses, and stay as close to the site as you possible can, you will get strength and support from the people here and THEIR journeys.
Best to you,
Ellen
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