Quitting Smoking: Keep Trying

Quitting smoking seems tough. Why is quitting smoking so hard to do?

I've been smoking since I was eight years old. Now don't go passing judgment on my parents. Back when I started smoking people had a different attitude about cigarettes and smoking. In fact, by the time I was ten years old, I was buying my own cigarettes at 75 cents a pack.

After a solid thirty years of puffing butts quitting smoking is definitely one of the biggest challenges I've ever faced. Over these past few days I've started a journal of sorts on the progress I've made, my recurrent slips, and my reasons for quitting smoking...and they're plenty.

But there's something I haven't looked at honestly and that's the reasons why I even smoke in the first place. It doesn't really make much sense. As far as I can tell, I don't get any sort of a "buzz" off of tobacco, and the only reason it seems to relax me is that I'm tense because of the craving for nicotine itself...and nothing more!

How crazy is that? What am I hoping for? Have I been pulling that crap into my lungs, for this many years, in the hopes to get a little dizzy again like that very first time I inhaled? Is that my nirvana?

And all these years of using the nerve-numbing effects of nicotine to mask so much just seems so foolish. I've used it to mask my emotions of any given moment. I've smoked in celebration and in sadness. I've smoked to wake up in the morning and to relax a little right before going to bed. That's part of what quitting so challenging. Smoking is tied emotionally to everything.

I used cigarettes as a mask for my feelings in all situations and also as a shield. You'll see just what I mean the next time you watch a smoker in a stressful situation with another person. Watch 'em and you'll never miss it again. Whenever I'm in an uncomfortable conversation with someone I light up so that the smoke comes up between me and them. It's a screen of sorts. It's a subtle barrier between my face and theirs. Quitting seems harder than actual human contact.

Even another smoker moves back ever so slightly when the trail of my cigarette's smoke starts to rise. The smoke serves as an ethereal border blocking true contact.

But when I'm alone, and there are no cigarettes around, I close my eyes and relax as deeply as I can. I drift and drop down to that place in my mind where my logic, emotions, and will meet in agreement. I go to that place where each part of my personality no longer disagrees and they each recognize each others validity. I find that spot where love and mathematics each make as much sense as the other ever do.

While I'm there I ask myself what it is that I'm hoping for from smoking cigarettes. What am I going after? The funny thing is that it seems what I'm looking for is that very thing that smoking pulls me the farthest from...youth. It seems that I suffer from the illusion, among other things, that smoking cigarettes represents those young, free, and fun days of my childhood. All the while those same cigarettes are aging me prematurely.

The addiction isn't logical at all. If it were logical it might not be an addiction at all. I can think of times in my life when it would've just been easier to stay home and not smoke but I'd get up, dress, and walk nine blocks in deep snow, to get to the store, and spend money to buy another pack of smokes.

This business of quitting smoking is opening up a can of worms for me to untangle.

Source:

Personal experience