It more or less dawned on me today that I've really quit smoking. LOL I know that may sound funny to anybody who has walked these 44 days with me, but it's true.
At the Q there's a saying. "Fake it till you make it." In other words, even when you don't feel like you're happy about quitting - act like you feel happy about quitting. Well, I've been acting (at times) like I'm a non-smoker. Most of the time I've acted like I'm an ex-smoker. It's one of those things you know already that can still sneak up on you and surprise you.
I'll be sitting in the truck, going somewhere with my Baby, and all of a sudden I realize I'm not even thinking about having a smoke. It's like "Oh! I really am doing it..." That's the ex-smoker kind of attitude. But a non-smoker kind of attitude is more like...
"Why on earth would I want to do a thing like put a paper tube full of poison in my mouth, light it on fire, and inhale the noxious fumes and toxic gasses it produces deep into my precious lungs?"
I also got to thinking the other day, trying to figure out why this has gone so much more easily for me than I believed it would. I think I may have been talking about the reason all along, without realizing that I was talking about myself. Remember, I'd been the closet smoker. I could go hours and hours, sometimes even days and days, without smoking.
When I thought about that, I realized that I could do that because I always gave myself a specific time when the waiting would be over and I could smoke. "You can have a smoke at 7 tonight. You can hang on till then..." That kind of thing. I'd be just find from that point until about 6 pm. From 6 until 7, time ticked by so slowly I'd just want to cry.
Now I'm writing in forums and encouraging people not to give themselves the option to smoke. "Don't give yourself an out!", I write... "Starve the Inner Addict!". and "Smoking is NOT an option!" You've probably already seen where this is going, but I swear I didn't see it till the other day. Guess that's part of the blinders an addiction imposes on the addicted person.
See, I was telling myself, before I quit, that I didn't have to have one until a specified hour. I didn't have to even think about it, because there was no way to smoke before that specified hour. There was... no option at all.
I had been practicing quitting all this time without realizing it! All I did differently now is that there is no smoking. The hour I can next have a smoke is never. So I don't have to think about it, stress about it, worry about it, or even care about it anymore. There's no option at all, so there's no overwhelming cravings or feelings.
I once spent four days in a hospital. Didn't think about a smoke until an hour before they let me out the door. Why did I not think about it until an hour before I got outside? Because I knew I wasn't allowed to go outside. Because, until 1 hour before I was released I didn't know I was going to be released.
Once I knew I was going to be released, the waiting was unbearable. Because at that point, I gave myself permission to think about smoking. I knew as soon as I was outside I would smoke, and soon I would be outside, ergo soon I would be smoking. Funny how the mind works.
Anyway - I give myself no option to smoke anymore. It's not a choice. It's not among the list of possibilities. Not One Puff Ever.
