Three years of freedom

[SarahP]

Tomorrow is my 3-year anniversary, and I want to share my story. I've shared bits and pieces of this before, but writing it all down this morning really helped me see the big picture of my life and this journey. I hope a new quitter might see something of themselves in this, and realize you're not alone on this journey and you never will be! 

Here's my story. 

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I grew up around smokers, as a kid in the ‘70s and a teenager in the ‘80s, in the suburbs of a large Midwestern city. Nearly every adult in my family smoked. The biggest movie and TV stars smoked. Cigarette ads and commercials were everywhere. Smoking was not only accepted, it was normal. Yes it made you sick later in life, but we’ve all gotta die of something, right? And in the meantime it sure made you look cool.

I experimented with smoking as a teenager (wanted to be cool, wanted to belong, wanted to impress a boy…), but I didn’t start smoking seriously until I was in graduate school at a prestigious, high-pressure university. I was in my early 20’s, and entering a whole new world of school stress, adult life stress, bars and pubs, and generally an older crowd than I had experienced in college. The smokers would talk about how good a cigarette tasted with coffee, as we all sat around the café. They would say “I’m so stressed, I need a smoke!” and appear to feel much better after lighting one. It all seemed perfectly reasonable to me, and it wasn’t long before I was smoking a pack a day.

Fast-forward a decade, and oh how things changed. Smoking was no longer normal, no longer accepted, no longer cool. The world went and changed on all of us proud smokers, and we were forced to confront some truths about ourselves and our habit. Sorry, our addiction.

I made several serious attempts to quit in my 30s, and several half-hearted ones that didn’t last a week. In every case I failed because I believed I was “over it”, and had “proved I can quit whenever I want” therefore what’s the harm in smoking for a few more years? I was still young and healthy, right?

Around my 40^th birthday, the world changed again. Well, my world. I had just gotten married, to a non-smoker. One of the first things we did was sign up for life insurance. How do you think my rates compared to his? And whenever I looked in the mirror I didn’t see the young, healthy, cool 20-something I had been; I was starting to see my mother. Overweight, dry skin and hair, lines starting to show on my face. Sun damage, I said to myself. All that tanning I did as a teenager. And a cough in the mornings that I said was just allergies. Denial is a smoker’s powerful, powerful friend.

The last straw that finally got me to take quitting seriously was my OB-GYN, who threatened to stop my birth control pill prescription unless I quit. The last thing I wanted was an unplanned pregnancy at 40, and the thought of changing to a less effective birth control method just seemed like such a hassle. I actually considered changing doctors, to find someone who would keep writing me the scrip. Thankfully I realized how irrational that was. Maybe it was finally time to quit. And maybe, just maybe, that morning cough had nothing to do with allergies.

The becomeanEX site and support community changed my life. Saved my life. I learned why all my other quit attempts had failed. I learned about the lies of addiction. I learned that “enjoying” a cigarette was nothing more than stopping withdrawal, 20 times a day. I learned how badly I had been kidding myself for so many years, and how much control over my life, my time, my money, and even my friendships and relationships I had given over to cigarettes. I even put cigarettes over my job, my livelihood, sometimes; for example declining meetings right after lunch because I wouldn’t have time to smoke. For a control freak like me to realize how much control I gave to the addiction was the biggest wake-up call of all.

I will be smoke-free for 3 years tomorrow, and at this point I can’t imagine ever going back to those chains again.

I quit smoking. You can too. This community can help.

Sarah

I quit making excuses to smoke 1,095 days ago. I have saved $6,703 by not smoking 24,094 cigarettes. I have saved 2 Months, 3 Weeks, 1 Day, 15 hours and 50 minutes of my life.