Long Post Warning: Where there's smoke, there's fire

[AMReed]

I'm going to use this week leading up to my quit date for reflection and preparation. I have been reading a lot of blog posts on here and have added several tip to my tool kit. There is so much inspiration on this site and it is comforting and reassuring. There's a good chance these next few blog posts are going to be long and rambling, so feel free to skip them. This is mostly just for me to get out my thoughts.

Last night I was thinking about how my husband and I met and eventually started dating. I was in my 5th year of college at Western Carolina University and I was really struggling with a lot of aspects of my life. WCU had always been my home. I grew up on that campus. But it was starting to feel like a foreign country and I was feeling unwelcome. And that day I was having an especially bad day. Pulled up into the driveway at my house that was shared with 5 other people and there was a car I didn't recognize in my regular spot. I was annoyed but because we didn't have assigned parking I just let it go and went inside. When I came back out to smoke, there was a stranger on the porch of the upper part of the house. My upstairs roomies introduced me. His name was Andy and he had graduated a couple years prior and came back for an event their fraternity was having (3 of my 5 roommates were all in the same music fraternity). I vaguely remembered him as the ex-boyfriend of a girl who was in my music fraternity (yes, music fraternity for women, not sorority). He had been showing off a family tree project he had completed for the chapter. I wandered in to check it out and lost a bit of interest and went back downstairs. Later that evening I went up for our regular evening beers and Andy was standing on the porch surrounded by my roommates and some other brothers and was speaking quite animatedly about the fraternity. There were new brothers there who were enthralled. So I sat down on the porch, beer in one hand, cigarette in the other, and just listened to him. I have never seen someone speak so passionately about something they cared about. I felt like I couldn't walk away. He continued to speak that way for most of the evening and into the night, chain smoking and getting more animated and more passionate with each beer he drank. He and I did chat a little and shared some of our passion for music but I didn't think anything of it. That night, he texted me while I was in bed at about 3 am and I knew exactly what a text like that meant and I was not having any of that. I had been through enough of that crap already, so I just told him I was tired and that I hoped he had a good night. He was around for another day or two and we chatted here and there, but then he left and I didn't think about him anymore.

At the end of that school year I ended up dropping out. I just couldn't take it anymore. I moved back home with my parents and found a job at an art center for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. This job started to pull me out of the deep depression I had been in for several years. I could feel myself becoming a happier and more confident person every day. In either late August or early September, Andy texted me out of the blue. We had not spoken at all since that weekend up at school. I honestly was really confused but remembered how much I enjoyed chatting with him so I returned the message. We started texting every day and he eventually asked me out on a date. The problem was we lived 3 hours apart and I also didn't feel super comfortable driving to a city I wasn't familiar with to meet up with a guy I didn't really know. So we planned out a weekend that included a group date and a fall back plan for myself in case things didn't go well. So October 18, 2018, I drove from my little town out to "The Big City" (Raleigh isn't big at all, but it felt big to me) to have dinner with him at his uncle's house (he was house sitting). He was cooking when I got there and asked how I was doing. I had been through so much since I had last seen him that I wasn't up for anyone who was going to play games or find my baggage to be too much, so I unloaded on him. I told him every single bad thing that had happened since the last time I saw him, especially the mistakes I had made. I made sure he understood that I was broken, but I was healing. He took in all the information in stride and just said, "Okay." No judgment, no asking me to leave, no awkwardness at all. Just, "Okay." He then told me about what had been going on in his life and it wasn't great either. He looked at me and said, "We're just bruised fruit, but it doesn't mean we're not good." After dinner he pulled out a cigarette and asked me if I still smoked, which I did. We spent most of the night just talking about anything and everything and chain smoking on the deck. We spent the entire weekend together and at the end of the weekend we went to the State Fair for our group date. But we didn't stay with the group long. We ended up breaking off and doing our own thing. He was so joyful and I couldn't stop smiling. We stayed until the fireworks at the end of the night. He took me back to my car, kissed me, told me he would talk to me soon, and I made the long drive back home. I kept replaying the weekend over and over in my head on the drive home. I knew it was too soon to love him, but I think I was pretty dang close.

We had been together for about a year when I decided to go back to college and finish my degree. I just knew it was something I had to do and the best way to get it done was to go back to the school where I started. This school was 5 and a half hours away from where Andy lived. We had been seeing each other about every other weekend and now we knew that that wouldn't be possible, at least until I had graduated. But he fully supported my decision and supported me through the whole process. He came and visited once each semester and I think I drove up to see him once each semester. We spent as much time together as we could during that summer between the two semesters. But despite the difficulty and the distance I kept going until I met with my advisor for the last time and she congratulated me because I would officially be graduating on December 12, 2015, 6 and a half years after I first started. My whole family came up for the ceremony, parents, brother, sister, grandparents, aunts, family friend that are pretty much family, and Andy, his mother, his sister, and his niece came up as well. After the ceremony, we met up in a plaza that over looked the football field. I was in marching band and so was Andy when he was there, so there are a lot of fond memories of that field. A lot of family memories on that field as well. My brother's girlfriend at the time was enlisted to get family pictures. The last set of pictures was just Andy and me. He wrapped me in a huge hug and then he got down on one knee. In front of our families, in the place that I called home, at a spot that was important to all of us, he asked me to marry him. I honestly don't know what he actually said because I said Yes before he even got done asking the question. Honestly, one of the best days of my life.

I ended up getting a job and Raleigh and moving in with him and his parents. We got our first apartment not long after that. In September of 2017, we got married in his uncle's backyard, the backyard of the home where we had out first date. It was a beautiful day and it was so fun. Family members still tell me how much fun they had. We are now in our 4th year of marriage and recently purchased and moved into our first house.

I've been thinking about this because cigarettes have been a constant part of our relationship. We smoke every where we travel and anytime we're driving. We still stay up late chatting on the deck, him chain smoking and me smoking less now. When he gets on his "soap boxes," as I call them, he still always has a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. I told him early in February that I wanted to quit smoking. He understood but he looked a little panicked. He asked if I was going to make him stop smoking. Of course I'm not going to do that. Me telling him that he has to quit won't make him quit successfully. He has to want to do it. Even if I told him he couldn't smoke when he's home, there's nothing that would stop him from smoking at work or in his car. And I'm fully accepting of that. I don't want to force him into anything he's not ready for. But we have discussed it and I do think he is at least contemplating it. He's talked about patches and medication but just isn't sure yet. He is such a creature of habit and routine that he got kind of weird when I put a plant on his dresser because it moved the bowl for his keys and wallet a little bit. If he ever does quit, I know him changing his routines is going to be the hardest for him. Over this past week, he'll see me on this site and ask what I'm doing and I explain what it is and he gets uncomfortable and doesn't say anything. When I was working on writing up my quit plan last night and he asked what I was doing, he actually looked kind of annoyed when I told him what I was writing. He ended up going to bed before me which he almost never does. I think he might think I'm not serious. I do have a habit of getting really excited about things and going all in for a while and then losing interest. I think he may think that this is just that and that maybe I won't be interested quitting when the time comes. I know he supports me in all of my decisions and endeavors, but I think this one is the hardest for him so far. And I think it's because he doesn't know what to expected. There has never been a time that we were together that either of us were non-smokers. And I honestly think he's a bit scared. Scared that I might succeed in my quit. And that if I succeed, that might mean he will have to quit. And that his 2 pack a day habit will no longer be part of his life. I hope that he becomes more comfortable with my quit. While my quit is mine and no one else's, it would be easier with his encouragement. He's the most important person in my life, so what he thinks matters a lot to me, but I also don't need his approval to do something that will better my life. He has supported every other thing that I have wanted to do since we started dating, even when he was uncomfortable with the decision, so I don't know how much different it will be now. But this is different I guess. This time we are dealing with addiction. I'm not going to force him to quit, and I know if I ask him not to smoke around me he won't smoke around me. But his apprehension isn't going to stop me from quitting. He will quit when he is ready and we might be a little awkward around each other for a little bit, but it will get better. I'm doing this for me, no one else, and I know he has my back.

(Side note: I was able to work through two cravings (one before and one during) by writing this really long post, so coming here to blog is already helping.)