REPOST - I'm still cleaning my library....many more to come. I'm coming around to my first year quit and I'm just trying to pass along some of the wisdom of those who came before me that helped me get here. Hopefully then, somebody else can get to where I am~~~fully comfortable in my non-smoking skin.
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I was thinking about smoking...
... about how I used to do it constantly... whenever ANYTHING at all happened in my life. Hungry... Tired... Angry... Happy... Bored... Indigested... Sick... Scared...Excited... every shift in mood, no matter how subtle, called for a cigarette. My life revolved around smoking. In fact, smoking became the punctuation of my life.
And then I quit.
Think about it... Think about what that means...
It means that by not smoking you suddenly remove all punctuation from your life... all the periods, commas, Capital letters... All those cigarettes that represented pauses, and exclamation marks, and question marks in your life just disappear overnight... everything that has guided you in the past is suddenly gone. So it is not then surprising that you might feel lost temporarily, or uncomfortable, or out of sorts. Of course it takes time for you to become accustomed to a new way of reading your life. But in time you do.
Try reading a book in a mirror... or remove all punctuation from a paragraph, and you will find it hard to decipher the words at first... but given time and practice it all becomes natural again. That is what quitting is like. A big change, but not an insurmountable one. And above all quitting is something very achieveable if you give it the necessary time. Patience, persistence, and practice... and a little perspective. That`s all you need.
Gummer
Y1 - 412 days
