Personal Journal

Babbling

You know, I don’t have much to say to my journal today. There’s no deep-seated psychological animus driving me to have conversations with myself. Frankly, I enjoy, deeply, the times when I am moved to be introspective and self-examining. I mean, when I go into ‘crazy head’ mode and my archetypes separate, those aren’t “enjoyable” but they tend to produce positive results.

A friend and I have had some discussions about our darker moods. She and I agree, dark moods are our calling. There’s nothing bad about that inherently, although I confess that personally, my dark side is also into self-mutilation. I say with some sense of loss that I just can’t do that anymore. People aren’t impressed by it <shrug>.

I think that’s why I loved smoking so much. The romance of self-destruction. Unfortunately, suffocating is a terrible way to die. And I’m asthmatic, so it’s probably how I’m going to go anyway; someday as an elderly man I’ll get pneumonia and I’ll drown at worst, or at best have a heart attack from the strain on my respiratory system. People don’t think about the way they’re likely to die. I think I just had to look ahead and prepare myself not to fear it, otherwise I would obsess over it.

But I quit smoking, three and a half years ago this month. One of the feats I’m more proud of from my past, because it was hard. And I was pre-disposed to enjoy slowly killing myself. What made me quit was waking up in the night 7 times on average to reach for my albuterol inhaler. That was a moment of self-realization. And when I was married, me and Renee used to like to go to breakfast every Sunday morning (we had money, that was the hook that kept me in that marriage far beyond the level of my spiritual health). I live in Colorado Springs, Colorado – a central point for the U.S. Military, with the Air Force Academy, a major Army base, and the center point of the largest branch of the Air Force. There are a lot of ex-military folks here, and tons of retired military folks here.

Every Sunday, we’d go wait in the short lines of Village Inn or Perkins or IHOP, and there would always be those guys, maybe they were late 60s, maybe they were early 80s, you could never tell. Their faces were haggard and leathered from toil and life-long exertion. And on their backs they carried their oxygen bottles, with the tube running up around their neck, the prods shallowly lodged in their nostrils, feeding them air so that they could endure whatever uneasy time they had left on earth.

I knew: that was going to be me if I didn’t quit smoking.

I mean, cigarettes are cancer sticks, no two ways about it. They breed the cells in your body insidiously, and I have a family history of abdominal cancer to boot, so I wasn’t doing myself any favors. So I did it, I quit (with the gum, incidentally, which I highly recommend for its ability to address purely psychological craving factors) and I told myself this: I’m an addict. If I have a puff on a smoke, I’ll have a cigarette, and in a day, I’ll be buying, if not smoking, an entire pack.

I’m not a militant ex-smoker. I know this about smokers. They all know they need to quit. Most of them want to quit, and know how to quit. But they’re not ready. They’re not ready to address all of the complicating factors that make it harder to quit smoking than it is to stay smoking.
Nicotine supplements (gum, patches) are more expensive than the cigarettes (a short-sightedness issue – but that money spent, for me, was incentive to be serious about success).
Weight gain (I tell them all: It’s easier to lose the weight after you quit than it is to quit – indeed, I gained 14 pounds after I quit, and I’m now at a lower weight than I was when smoking, thanks mostly to exercise, and now weight watchers).
Social pressure. Ineed, smokers have a hard time letting go of one of their clan. It reminds them of where they should be…

To quit smoking, there is one thing you need above all else. Desire to succeed. I don’t know any way to measure desire. For me, it was funny. Me and a co-worker planned on quitting on April 1, 2000 (a Saturday, as I recall). We didn’t have contact over the weekend. I didn’t quit. On Monday, I came in and told her I hadn’t stopped, and she said she hadn’t either. I smoked all day Monday, and into Tuesday. But on Tuesday, around lunchtime, I had one of those conversations with the self that you see me have here in my journal on occasion, and it produced a sort of resignation to ambition (and I mean that as I’ve written it). I HAD to be moving toward that goal. I had to succeed. At lunch, I went and got the nicotine gum, read up on their 12-week program, came home and announced to Renee that I had quit (she smoked still at that time), and I never yielded.

If I’m at all lucky, my last resignation to ambition, coming to this site to strengthen my writing and pursue my goals, will have equally productive results…



It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn