So, you're thinking a about quitting. What is stopping you? I know. You're afraid of the F-word. Not that F-word, the other one. No, not that one either.
GUS (Gave Up Smoking) is a community support diary for Kossacks in the midst of quitting smoking. Any supportive comments, suggestions or positive distractions are appreciated. We avoid discussion of political issues. If you are quitting or even thinking about quitting, please -- join us! GUS Library at dKosopedia is organically evolving, and stocked with free-range information: quit-smoking links, helpful GUS diary writing tips, and the GUS Buddy List.
The word is Failure. Nobody likes to fail. What if you quit, telling everyone you know, and then start up again? You failed, right? No, you did not. "But," you wail, "everyone thinks I'm a pathetic loser with no willpower!" Some will think that.
People who used to smoke (unsmokers) won't. They KNOW what you're going through. When you quit again, tell them. They understand and will help you. You can let the whole world know later. Alternatively, you can just not say anything to the non-smokers and see if any of them notice. You'd be surprised how many don't. To hell with them. My partner hasn't noticed yet.
It's like basketball. Mikey Jordon didn't just step onto the court one day, shooting 3-pointers on his first try.
The second time I quit was very successful, until I started again after 8 months. I used the patch, the not telling everybody, and the following technique (From the book, Illusions by Richard Bach):
...I practiced vaporizing clouds. I have been a flight instructor, and I know that students always make easy things hard; I do know better, yet there was I a student again, frowning fiercely at my cumulus targets. I needed more teaching, for once, than practice. Shimoda was stretched out under the Fleet's wing, pretending to be asleep. I kicked him softly on the arm, and he opened his eyes.
"I can't do it," I said.
"Yes you can," he said, and closed his eyes again.
"Don, I've tried! Just when I think something's happening, the cloud strikes back and goes poufing up bigger than ever."
He sighed and sat up. "Pick me a cloud. An easy one, please."
I chose the biggest meanest cloud in the sky, three thousand feet tall, bursting up white smoke from hell. "The one over the silo, yonder," I said. "The one that's going black now."
He looked at me in silence. "Why is it you hate me?"
"It's because I like you, Don, that I ask these things." I smiled. "You need challenge. If you'd rather, I could pick something smaller..."
He sighed again and turned back to the sky. "I'll try. Now, which one?"
I looked, and the cloud, the monster with its million tons of rain, was gone; just an ungainly blue-sky hole where it had been. "Yike," I said quietly.
"A job worth doing..." he quoted. "No, much as I would like to accept the praise which you heap upon me, I must in all honesty tell you this: it's easy." He pointed to a little puff of a cloud overhead. "There. Your turn. Ready? Go."
I looked at the wisp of a thing, and it looked back at me. I thought it gone, thought an empty place where it was, poured visions of heat-rays up at it, asked it to reappear somewhere else, and slowly, slowly, in one minute, in five, in seven, the cloud at last was gone. Other clouds got bigger, mine went away.
"You're not very fast, are you?" he said.
"That was my first time! I'm just beginning! Up against the impossible...well, the improbable, and all you can think to say is I'm not very fast. That was brilliant and you know it!"
"Amazing. You were so attached to it, and still it disappeared for you."
"Attached! I was whocking that cloud with everything I had! Fireballs, laser beams, vacuum cleaner a block high..."
"Negative attachments, Richard. If you really want to remove a cloud from your life, you do not make a big production out of it, you just relax and remove it from your thinking. That's all there it to it."
It worked well for me. I went to bars, hung out with my smoking friends, ate meals without a craving. I just wasn't thinking about it-I was thinking about the forward moves I was making. The version of me that smoked? That was some other person I barely recognized.
=================
This was my method on my (current) third try:
I stopped buying packs or cartons, and got one of these:
I bought a bag of tobacco and a box of tubes. Then I made a carton worth of cigs. That took a solid day and a half. It isn't easy to make those, and the dust will be everywhere. It really sucked-my hand was in agony.
I made a pact with myself that I would only make one cig at a time. Since they are so difficult to make, my smoking went from a bit under two packs a day to one pack. So far, so good. Then I stepped it up a notch. I put the machine and stuff on the highest shelf in my closet. It could only be reached with stepladder. I had to be really motivated to get off my ass and go get the stuff to make one cig. My smoking dropped to half a pack.
December 14th rolled around. Before going to bed, I threw away my last ashtray and the machine, and took the trash down to the dumpster. I buried my bag under all the other bags. I took out one patch and put it on my keyboard. I took a long, hot shower, brushed my teeth to get the smell and taste out and went to bed. In the morning, I put on my patch, and started with the laundry. I had my plan to rehab the apartment, and got started with gusto. It is a several month project and will keep me busy until I'm long past being done with the patches.
I'm doing okay for now. Thanks to Gussacks, I have a support group that I didn't have the last time. And that makes all the difference in the world.
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