Tomorrow marks my third month as an ex-smoker. Cancer was good
for something, I guess.
But I remain hopelessly addicted to nicotine. There are multiple times each day when I
lust for a cigarette.
Habits die hard. When I leave the house, a lighter and a pack of cigarettes are invariably on my mental checklist. I feel like an amputee aching for a phantom limb. The lighter
and cigarettes are no longer there, but they're still part of me. I miss
them badly.
The place where cigarettes are most conspicuously absent are
in my car. Driving and smoking (with a mug of coffee sloshing in the cup
holder) were as essential as breathing for many years.
It’s hard to say how many cigarettes I’ve smoked while driving. Suck one down, carelessly flick it out the window, drive a few miles and light another. I watch other drivers do that now with idiotic envy.
I've made a crude calculation of the number of cigarettes I've smoked
during my life. At an average of a pack a day over 30-plus years, it's more than 200,000.
The cost of those cigarettes? I don’t want to know. I don't want to consider the trips that we could have been taken with that money; the tuition
that could have been paid; the life that would have been saved.
My self-loathing is boundless. No one can or should try to convince me otherwise. It's well-deserved.
Good job, Mark.
I am a month away from being a 1 year ex smoker. I think the only thing that keeps me from going back is not wanting to go through this again.. Stick with it Mark, it does get better, although I still "lust" (good way to put it) for a cig at least once per day, it gets better, I promise you...
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