Quitting Smoking Does Not Mean “Quit Forever” - Day 17
Yesterday was a toughy for some reason, probably my worst smoke free day since day #2. I don’t know if was the fact that I stayed in my windowless office for nearly 6 hours without a hint of daylight, only to come out to find Portland’s gutters overflowing, but I just wanted to smoke like a muthafucka, especially after heading to Shanrock’s Trivia at La Merde.
My friend Luke was there, smoking a cigarette . He mentioned that he started taking Zyban / Wellbutrin to quit. That’s something I once tried myself. It worked pretty good, you taper down the cigarettes naturally since the chemical reaction makes’em taste like shit. I found didn’t smoke for a month or so, but really, it just made me complacent. I didn’t have moods, neither highs nor lows, so I stopped taking it and went right back to smoking. Really I didn’t want to quit then, I wasn’t ready to quit, and I had built it up into something so big that it wasn’t going to succeed. Indirectly though, it helped me quit…this time around.
What I’ve learned this time around is that instead of quitting forever, I’m really only choosing not to smoke for the next hour. Then when that hour is up I make another decision: do I have a smoke, or do I not? Mentally, treating it this way puts the idea of quitting into mangeable terms. It’s not a last hurrah, it’s not a bitter end, and it’s not this irrevocable act that forever dictates sets you up for a bleak, smokeless future. It’s simply holding out “just a little longer”. That’s all you need to do, and ultimately why I think I’ll be successful this time around.