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Share your quitting journey

What color is your quit?

motherlovebone
0 17 60

I've been examining my commitment to my final quit day coming up (8 more days). 
I'm holding it in my hand, feeling its shape, it's weight, looking for the weak places so I can make them as strong as possible beforehand, or at least be aware of those places so I can be ready for them and have a plan to deal with them.  I'm a visual person, so being able to hold on to a picture in my mind's eye might make it easier to hold on to this quit, I'm thinking.  Right now, my quit is yellow, because it only exists in my mind until I DO IT, and it consists entirely of hope.

I'm a visual person, a sensory person, so being able to picture, in my mind's eye what my quit looks like might make it easier to hold on to, I'm thinking.  In the past, the colors that have always resonated with me the most are red and blue (and sometimes purple...the combination of those two).  If I go back and look at my art over the years, these are almost always the prominent colors.  They're also the colors of art I'm most drawn to.

I tend to live my life in reds and blues. 
When I'm feeling the red, I'm full of life, jumping from one project to another, sometimes with very little sleep, starting projects with the energy of ten people behind me.  The amount of stuff I can get done when I am manic is pretty amazing, really.  Maybe not completely healthy...but still.  I take a kind of pride in it.  I feel my best when I am being uberproductive.  Red, to me, is all about power...fire...force.
When blue is the prominent color of my mood, I am at rest, which is a harder place for me to be.  I feel withdrawn, cool and a bit detatched from the world around me.  I can let whole weeks slip by me and yet time expands to make hours feel like days...and I am hard on myself when I feel that my energy has abandoned me.  I sleep a lot, read a lot, and do things that allow me to escape what feels to me like the drudgery of every day life.
My cycles of mania and depression are very long...I usually go a year or so in each place and then have a year or two of what I am told is normality.  And I think during these times I do feel like everyone else...I have days that are easier than others, days that are harder, and am able to sleep well and be consistent in my life.
What I see as my biggest hurdle to quitting smoking is my lack of consistency. 
I am an excellent big picture person.  If you want big ideas, I'm your gal.  The details, though, the little things that make those ideas actually come to fruition?  Yeah...they kind of bore me.  You'll need to look elsewhere.  I'm working on developing that and with each passing year I get a little better at it.
So I'm going to try and paint this quit in my hand green. 

Green, to me, is about growth.  It symbolizes rebirth, abundance, and stability.   Green is the color of the world under the redwoods where I live.  It is a color of emotional stability, of balance, of harmony.  If my quit is green, though, it looks something like the picture above.  I've lots of experience starting quits, but this forever quit has to be different.  So it's brand new.  Like that tiny plant.
One of the things I'm most worried about is the tenacity I will need to suceed.  I can power through weeks or even months working on a project if I am fired up enough about it, but it's difficult for me to find things in my life that I have been committed to over the long term. 
Except, maybe.......smoking! 
Yup...slowly committing suicide by putting that poison into my lungs is something I have strayed from on occasion, but always come back to.  Maybe I can flip this commitment on it's head, turn it over to be committed to the other side, but I'm so frightened that I'm just not tempermentally suited for it.  That's probably an excuse...I can feel that it is while I type it.  I know that breaking an addiction is really just a series of small choices...making the right choice for my health and my spirit over and over and over again.  Taken one at a time, it's easy to fend those urges off, like Thomas says to ride each one like a wave until it passes, to gain confidence with each time I delay past the urge, distract myself from even thinking about it.  But I'm having real trouble visualizing myself making that same choice every. single. time.
So EXperts...and others with lots of EXperience...it's just not realistic for me to stay in the moment indefinitely.  I know that is the best approach, day by day, but eventually, I'll need to pull back and look at the big picture.  And I have to be able to see those days stretching out behind me without cigarettes in order to look to the other horizon and see the remainder of my days being smoke free...FREE of nicotine. 
Just writing this down is giving me a good visual image to hang on to, but I'd like to hear your thoughts.  Colors are subjective, so maybe newbies and experts alike can tell us about the color of their quit.  Has it changed over the long term?  I am just starting out, and my quit really is like that tiny plant up there, but this is the new image I will hold in my head as I approach being an EXsmoker for LIFE, taking it into my very being, into my core, making it a part of what defines me:

Enjoy your Sunday, everyone..........xo~mlb

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