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What's Ahead
What's Ahead
From gummer on 5/24/2012 2:31:44 PM
Gosh, it was nine years yesterday. Nine years since I quit. It doesn't seem that long ago, but then I have a child a few months younger than my quit and he's huge, so I can sort of "see" how long it has been. It's a chunk of my life now.
I like to post around anniversaries just to... I don't know... report back to you from your future? ... let you know what is ahead... because when I first quit my fears of quitting and the struggle to come were far greater than the reality of what I have found. My fears got in the way and they should not have. I would have quit a lot earlier had I known what the future held.
Here is what I want you to know nine years after quitting:
(1) - No matter how you feel now, you will not be quitting forever. You get over the hard stuff. You return to your old self. You forget about smoking. You forget about quitting. You wonder what you ever found in it. Contrary to what I thought, you do not sit there pining for a smoke for all eternity. Quite the contrary, when you think of smoking all you feel is relief that you are no longer trapped doing it. Would I go back? Not on your life!
(2) You can never smoke again. But that's not a problem, because on this side of your quit it is a blessing rather than a curse. I really mean it.
(3) - By quitting TODAY, what you are doing is massively important. What you are doing TODAY will dictate where you find yourself in nine years. I was in my late thirties when I quit... now I am in my late-ish forties. I cannot even imagine how I would find myself today with nine extra years of smoking under my belt and in my lungs. That is an enormous amount of unnecessary abuse and addiction. At just a pack a day that is another 65,000+ cigarettes I would have smoked!!! Sixty-five-thousand. And for what? Knowing what I know now that is not just tragic, it is criminal. I never needed to smoke. It was only smoking that made me smoke. And it took quitting to learn that.
(4) - You may think you love smoking. You may think you miss smoking. But you are just addicted. That's all. And that is not bad news, it is good news. Quitting is not going to deprive you of something you love... it is going to make you shed a huge burden you are carrying around. Realizing that you are just addicted is what will allow you to free yourself of this curse. Realizing that you are addicted is what will allow you to get yourself un-addicted.
(5) When you become un-addicted... can you smoke again? Nope, because when you become un-addicted the last thing you will ever want is another cigarette! If you find yourself wanting one, then you are still addicted, so you carry on quitting. But honestly, you'll most likely find you never want to smoke again.
(6) Last one, but this one is REALLY important: Your quit will not just happen, it will take place when YOU make it happen, not a moment sooner. There is no magic bullet, no accident, no divine intervention, no luck. It makes no difference if you use NRT or go CT. What matters is that YOU make it happen because until that day, you will continue to be a smoker. Understand that before you let nine more years go by. Only you can stop yourself from smoking. Only you can make yourself smoke.
These are some random thoughts, which I hope will ease your way during the early days. Sometimes you have to plug ahead on blind faith, so I hope that having heard your future is bright might make you hang on long enough to get through a bleak moment, long enough to unmask what is really going on, long enough for that lightbulb to suddenly go off and let you see it so clearly that you start to prefer not smoking to smoking.
Congrats on your quits! Time will fly by once you're over the hump.
Gummer