Unbelievable. I truly never thought I would see this day. In honor of my one year smoke-free milestone, I went running for an hour and a half this morning, the longest I've ever gone. I wasn't even out of breath at the end. On my walk back to my apartment, I just broke down in tears. I almost started hyperventilating. I just can't believe I did this. I haven't gone a year without a cigarette since I was 11 years old. I want to thank everyone here for making this possible. It never would have happened without the smoking cessation forum.
This occasion is somewhat bittersweet, so if you are feeling vulnerable in your quit or are just starting out, you might want to stop reading now. When I started this journey at 6pm, October 7, 2006, I was a glazed-eyed Allen Carr acolyte. I'd just finished his book for the third time, and decided, "That's it. I'm done." I flushed a pack and a half of cigarettes down the toilet, wrote "I'm free!" on a piece of paper, and taped the paper to my bedroom window. While part of me was worried about failing (AGAIN...there have been so many failures, a number of them after more than 3 months without cigarettes), another part of me had absorbed the Carr philosophy and was thinking, "This is going to be easy. Smoking offers me nothing."
With all due respect to Allen Carr, whom I admire very much, this has NOT been easy. It has been an acutely painful year. As it turns out, far from offering me nothing, smoking was offering me much more than I'd ever supposed: a way to block out my emotions, a way to not deal with things, a way to escape. The very worst part of this year has been all of the memories that have been seeping out from whatever hole in my soul in which they've been buried. Every single day, I've been accosted by my past. Some of the memories are unbelievably trivial, some make me smile a bit, some are awful. When I decided to quit smoking, I didn't realize I was going to be forced to relive every aspect of my past. I blocked things out for good reason. It's been like an emotional Bataan death march. If I'd known this was in store, I never would have quit. That's the honest truth. However, once I'd embarked upon this journey, it seemed too late to turn back.
Change happens so slowly that we often don't even realize it's happening. I know that all of this pain is me growing, me changing, me learning how to deal with things and with my emotions, me evolving into the person I was always meant to be. My journey is not over. This is still not easy. One year is just not sufficient to get me to where I need to be. I don't feel like I should enter the clubhouse yet. Perhaps I could sit like a gargoyle on the stoop, welcoming new arrivals, until my day comes.
So, why am I still not smoking? If it's all pain and suffering and misery, why not just go back to my old friend, the cigarette? Because the benefits I've enjoyed since quitting are innumerable.
#1: I've lost weight since I quit smoking and can now wear a size 4!
#2: I am no longer on high blood pressure medication.
#3: Instead of just moaning about my job, which is what I've done for a long time, I actually got the courage to do something about it. I applied to graduate school, and started courses this fall. In two years, I'll be licensed for an entirely different kind of work. Also got the courage to apply for a scholarship, which I never thought I would win (as a smoker, I would have told myself, "No point in applying for it"). I won it, and it will pay for my whole graduate school education.
#4: Before I quit smoking, my hands were a source of shame to me because they were so dry and cracked and withered and yellow, even right after I'd applied lotion. Since quitting, my hands seem to be ultra-moisturized all of the time, even without lotion. My fingernails are pink and white, and I now feel like my hands are an asset rather than a detriment. I have received three compliments on my hands in recent months.
#5: I always worried that I would never be able to truly concentrate without cigarettes and/or nicotine gum. Because of this, I've been very nervous about going back to school. I had my first graduate school test last week, an Advanced Pathophysiology exam. Permit me to brag for a moment: out of 200 people in the class, only 3 people got a score of 100 -- and I was one of them! This has made my confidence soar, and proves that I don't need cigarettes or nicotine in order to be able to concentrate. In fact, now I'm wondering if my concentration isn't a lot better than it used to be when I was smoking.
#6: When I was smoking, I felt like my life was pretty much over. It wasn't like I was going to kill myself or anything, but I felt ready to die if something happened. At the ripe old age of 38, I felt that anything that was going to happen to me in life probably had already happened, and that there was nothing to look forward to. I felt tired, old, and washed-up. Looking back, that really seems like bizarre thinking. I am 39 now, and 39 is really comparatively young. I now feel like there are a lot of possibilities. There's no longer that sense of, "Nothing interesting is ever going to happen to me again," but that's truly how I felt when I was smoking.
#7: I now want to travel. In fifteen years, I have not been on a real "vacation," i.e., a trip that wasn't a visit to a friend or family member's house. I always felt like, "Well, I won't be able to smoke on the plane, and then I might not be able to smoke in the hotel room, and it might be awkward to find places to smoke at the destination site," and then I just decided that it was a lot easier to stay home and forget about it. Now, I want to go places. I want to revisit some of the New England towns of my childhood: Concord, Salem, Gloucester. I want to go to Weston, Vermont, and see that little library again. I want to go to Ireland. I want to go out west. I want to go hiking. This represents a huge change from the old "slug" me.
