My story:
I started smoking when I was about 13 or 14. That would have been 1962 or 63. The Beatles were just emerging, and I tried the ‘cancer-sticks’, as my mother used to call them. After the first brutal coughing attempts, things settled down, and I wasn’t really hooked. It was just something I did from time to time. Back in that day, it was much more common to be a smoker than not. There were no ‘non-smoking’ areas anywhere, and the poor non-smokers simply had to put up with it. I’m writing this, not to excuse myself (or anyone else), but to point out how much attitudes have changed in less than half a century. Even then we knew that cigarettes harmed our health, but this was received in an abstract way, as in, ‘yes, this information that cigarettes harm your health doesn’t apply to me, look at old Joe over there, he smokes two packs a day and is strong as a horse and 80 years old.’
Fast forward to my university education: This cemented my relationship with the cigarette, or as we used to call them ‘fags’ – a cause for huge US hilarity at the time. And thus it continued.
I noticed the walls closing in gradually over the years. The banning of smoking on airplanes (ironically not a health issue, but to reduce cleaning costs), the introduction of no-smoking zones in restaurants (even I was glad of them, I hated smoke wafting across my food), and the beginnings of social pressure not to smoke around children.
This was followed by the emergence of non-smokers physical disdain and disgust if one dared to light up when they were around. Even I would now only have a ciggy outside the house or in the garage. As the 90’s rolled around, many workplaces ‘at best’ had a place where you could smoke, usually in some windy stairwell, but many banned smoking completely on their premises. I recall being at a job interview where the HR person came up to me and smelled me, then wrote something down. I didn’t get that job.
In the intervening years, I’d tried to give up smoking, probably 3 serious times. I never got beyond the third day, in one case, my now ex-wife went out and purchased me a pack as I was being so cranky. I felt as though I was in a cage with a beast, and the cage was getting smaller.
In 1997, I had a huge change of life circumstance. I migrated to California, probably the most smoking repressive place on the planet. I had learned from my many transatlantic crossings that I could indeed survive many hours without cigarettes by using nicotine gum, and I was hoping that this would give me the ‘push’ I needed. Not only that, but my new partner suffers from asthma, and I had promised her that I would not smoke when she was near.
Did that work? Of course not. I worked away a lot of the time, and had whole weeks where there was no constraint on my habit. When I was at home, working from home, I could simply use the balcony. It was the weekends that were worst when my new bride was around. I’d have to sneak off on my motorcycle, "Just filling it up, dear", to get a smoke.
But I was beginning to get worn down. It was becoming so much of an effort to have a cigarette that I sometimes opted to have a stick of nicotine gum instead.
Then it dawned on me, I could give up smoking!!!
I thought to myself, ‘better to be hooked on Nicotine gum than cigarettes.’ So I didn’t set myself a target date to come off the gum, I just stopped smoking one day, and used gum instead. I don’t even recall which year it was, never mind the day. I think that it was March of 2004, but I’m not at all certain, it could have been 2005. For about 12 months, I stuck with the high strength (4mg) gum. No relapses, nothing. It was actually more convenient. During that year I had tried the 2mg strength a couple of times, but discovered I needed the ‘buzz’ from the higher strength.
I tried again with the lower dose at the end of that first year, and I discovered that I could live with it. So that continued for another year, with me entirely happy about the situation – remember, I had been smoking for 30 plus years, I needed to give myself every break I could to get off them.
After that second year, I tried cutting the 2mg gum in half. Hey, that works! I carried on with 1mg half sticks for a couple of months. ‘How about quarter sticks?’ I asked myself. That worked, too. It suddenly dawned on me that I was not only cigarette but nicotine free.
To test out this theory, I went and bought some Orbit chewing gum.
I’ve been addicted to a pack of Orbit every day since then. Nasty, horrible habit!
Seriously. If I don’t have a pack of Orbit to hand, I get extremely twitchy.
At least the cage is bigger and the beast less ferocious. <grin>
Oh, and when I announced that I was cigarette-free for the last 2 years, and nicotine-free for 24 hours to the bride, she said in a somewhat unsurprised tone, ‘That’s nice, dear’.
There’s something truly useful, I think, to have advocates gunning for you in this fight. Not that I’m dissing her, she’s lovely and beautiful, but I had never revealed the extent of my addiction, so she never knew how hard it was to give it up. I’m guessing that I’m saying that if you’ve never been addicted to nicotine, you have no clue how hard it is to stop.
I don’t, I hope, need to tell you that everyone is different, and everyone finds, or doesn’t, their own way to G.U.S.
I guess my message is ‘give yourself a break, give yourself time’. For some people, like me, this was a long multi-year project.
Happy, happy dance. Orbit is cheap.