Reinventing History

Since every important moment in my whole life - well my teen and adult life anyway - has involved smoking do I have to reinterpret my own history?

To some degree, I think so. I have to reinterpret the meaning of the cigarette and see it as a self-defeating coping mechanism.

It's helpful, after the terrible mourning the lost of your best friend grief, to recognize that you could have and should have made another choice.

I just read In An Instant, by Lee and Bob Woodruff and found one part really struck me as very different from myself. When she received the phone call that her husband had been blown up in Iraq her first coping strategy was to go outside and jog.

JOG! Are you freaking kidding me?

There is not a single-place in my memory of stress where my first reaction was to jog. Mostly there have been cigarettes and various other less than healthy reactions like perhaps drinking or popping pills or sobbing or screaming or eating too much. Never, ever jogging.

Until I quit smoking and decided to replace my negative and self-defeating coping strategies with healthy non-harmful strategies. It's the creation of new habits. Just habits. Since I have been working out and exercising and drinking water I find that when I get stressed out I do turn to that. Since smoking is out and I refuse to pick up other bad habits as I discard this one - I am more likely to go to the gym when I am upset. I make sure I don't miss my yoga class whether I feel like it or not.

This makes me less likely to be stressed. Perhaps my seeing my perma-smoke in the memory of me as a negative self-defeating reaction opens the door for me to change my future reactions?

Can you believe that you might jog rather than smoke in the face of stress?

Cinematic Conceit

Do you ever picture your life in the 3rd person? Like you watch your behavior from the outside to see how it looks?

I think lots of smokers would secretly admit there is a level of cinematic conceit about their smoking. Your smoking is dramatic or cool or something that looks attractive on film or in a commercial. Smoking is your prop and you're the star of the show?

Okay, I admit it. There is an element of cinematic conceit to MY smoking. I see the dramas of my life and a cigarette is always present. Sitting on a curb crying and smoking with a broken heart. Slamming a door in the heat of anger, lighting up with a flip of my hair. Deep exhales after sex. Rocking out in my carefree moment on the dance floor in my heals, with a cigarette in my hand.

Every emotion, every drama, every heart break, every pivotal moment, joy, happiness, sorrow - in my memory that plays the tapes back there has been a cigarette. And I'm attached to that. Smoking is attached to all the emotions of my life. My whole history. My whole story. Connected to smoking.

But, I'm willing to let it go. To give it up, we have to open the door for future triumphs, sorrows, emotions, pivotal moments to be smoke free.

Envision what you want tomorrow to be like and try to picture it without a cigarette. Can I let myself picture my daughter's wedding without me having to sneak out the back door for a smoke? Can I picture going to church and sitting through the whole service without needing a smoke break? Could there be a break at work without stepping out for a break to smoke?

Can I have my cinematic conceit without making smoking the prop? Could I have a moment without thinking about how it would look on film or in a novel? Can I just live a life without the conceit?

Can you?

Feel Like Puking?

Nausea is a common side effect of quitting with Chantix. It felt to me like morning sickness when I was pregnant.

To the women - during morning sickness you suck it up and tell yourself it's worth it to create new life. Well, this is your new life. You have to look at it that way. During the pregnancy it's about the baby's life, this time it's about your life. You are just as worth it. You really are.

To the men - {Shrill witch-like laughter) Maybe next time you'll have more compassion for the barfing pregnant lady to your right. It's about time you knew what it felt like to go through days and months of wanting to puke. Finally justice!

Seriously though. Nausea is better than emphysema or any number of cancers or a heart attack - all "side effects" of smoking.

Adjust your eating and drinking around the Chantix for a few months. Make sure you drink a large glass of water before you take the pill. Make sure you eat something hearty like peanut butter toast when you take it in the morning.

You can do this. It's a small price to pay.

Cheater Cheated

Totally cheated. Bought Cigarettes. Nasty. Smoked through the nasty. There was drinking involved. I went to a club, drank and smoked and it was really fun.

Bad non-smoker. Lapse is not the same as a relapse, right? But, back on the Chantix. I am still a non-smoker who had a weekend cheat. No one has to ever know. Well, at least not my 5-year-old, who isn’t an avid reader of this blog yet.

I Suck

by Tracee Sioux

I am not a smoker.

I have been writing this message on my wrist for the last year on and off. I read in a magazine that it's supposed to help me kick the habit. It's supposed to help me redefine myself as a non-smoker. It's supposed to change my identity from one as a smoker to a non-smoker.

Other methods I've tried include:


Nicotine gum - disgusting. (yes, in my opinion more disgusting than smoking - have they ever heard of a flavor?),
Nicotine patch -most effective, but eventually you stop using it and then the cheating starts,
Acupuncture - ridiculously ineffective,
2 pregnancies - you think this is the answer cause it's 9 months of not smoking, but eventually you're not pregnant and the stress of a newborn baby and the desire to lay claim to your own physical body overrides the fact that you are no longer physically addicted to nicotine.
Self-Loathing and the Loathing of Dependency - really it just makes you feel bad about yourself while you smoke for being so weak and fallible.
Single-cigarette purchases - this is pretty effective for the weaning time because if you buy a pack you will smoke a pack. This allows you to buy a single cigarillo to get your nicotine hit and feeds the psychological need to make the hand-to-mouth motions. However, I find myself buying them two at a time and then smoking them while wearing the nicotine patch.
Goal Setting - the latest one was to give up smoking for Lent. Heck, it's only 40 days, surely I can do that for God and all.
Psychological Conditioning - supposedly if you snap your wrist with a rubber-band then you will condition yourself not to want a cigarette. Whatever.
Sunflower seeds and gum and computer solitaire - The notion is that if you keep your hands and mouth busy you will not need the hand-to-mouth motions of smoking.
I used to say, in defense of cigarette manufacturers, People have a right to kill themselves if they want to.

In walks the five-year-old conscience, Mommy! Please don't smoke that cigarette. You'll DIE! I don't want you to die! Who will I be with if you die! No more smoking Mommy! Throw it away! You said you wouldn't smoke anymore!

I would like to slap the crap out of whoever it was that told my kid that I will die if I smoke! Seriously - if I find out who did this to me, you're in deep, deep $%&#.

So, since I can not tolerate the deception of hiding behind buildings and sneaking around to smoke I resolve every single day to quit. To never smoke again. Because it seems I have actually lost the right to kill myself, at least peacefully, by becoming someone's mother. Unfortunately, I very often feel like a total failure for my inability to stick to it.

I don't smoke everyday anymore. Sometimes, I'll go a whole week without a cigarette. I've gone months without buying a pack of cigarettes. I'll see liberation from smoking on the horizon. And then when true freedom is within my grasp, I'll let myself believe in the alluring, yet delusional, notion that I can smoke sometimes without the consequences of a full-on addiction to cigarettes.

I'll bum one off a known smoker. Just one - okay, maybe two. I've even pulled up to a gas station and bummed them off a stranger, just one. I'll pay you $1 for one - see I'm trying to quit and this way I don't buy a whole pack.

Ah, but that one was so good. It made me feel like my old self again. You know, the girl who could smoke if she damn well felt like it? Her, I liked her. I miss her. Maybe just two then.

Or maybe only when I'm not around the kids. Or only when I drink a few beers. (WARNING - This logic will turn you into an alcoholic. Really, who needs to fight more than one addiction at a time?)

The road to my addiction to cigarettes has been incredibly long. I thought the guy who sat in front of me in 7th grade English class smelled divine. Camel cigarettes on a Levi jacket. Yummy! I thought it was exciting to take a drag off a cute boy's cigarette, yeah I'm cool like that. Erotic beyond belief when my boyfriend would blow a drag into my open mouth (nauseating what used to be a turn-on isn't it?)

And I smoked unapologetically for basically two decades. I never, ever felt bad about it. I LOVED it. Cigarettes saw me through every drama, crisis and celebration of adolescence and early adulthood. I only tried to quit once, when I went on vacation with my family trapped in an Oldsmobile and I swear I would have hitch-hiked home had I thought I could make it out of the state of Texas in under a week. After that, my family was happy that I was not attempting to quit smoking in their presence.

But, now I can't even smoke in peace. One can not enjoy cigarettes while their child is crying about how Mommy is going to die. And if I'm not enjoying it - what is the point of doing it? I've kicked the physical addiction. It's just the psychological bond that remains, like shackles around my printed on wrists.

This is about my freedom - I can if I want! Evidently, what I don't have is the freedom NOT to smoke.

According to Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist, the secret to life is to fall down seven times and then get up eight.

Okay, off to buy the nicotine patch again. After just one more drag . . .



Read more about the success of a new smoking cessation pill called Chantix at Blog Fabulous. I tried it, cheated a time or two, and then a miracle occured and I quit smoking. So did over 600 other lifelong smokers. I really can say that I'm a non-smoker and so can you!