Hello friends, and hello, me.
I will be offline for a while, going into circumstances that feel perilous, that I associate strongly with smoking. I feel vulnerable. So I am setting an intention here to protect my quit.
I’m going on vacation – my first true vacation in a long time - and heading into the backcountry of my homeland. I have spent countless happy hours there smoking and tending the campfire… smoking and drinking strong tea… smoking and glassing the horizon for caribou, moose and bears… smoking and fishing. I am carrying my father’s ashes to a river where memory and sorrow both run deep. Dad died during the pandemic lockdowns, and now it’s time to take him home and set him free in the place where I want my own ashes to go, to intermingle with the ancient glacial silt and flow toward the sea.
Triggers abound. While packing yesterday, I found myself fiddling with multiple lighters and tucking matches into tiny ziplocs, “just in case.” Without pausing to think, I automatically grabbed the old film canisters I used for my butts while hiking and fishing. Even with 18 months under my belt, smoking is still deep in my tissues. Triggers, triggers.
After more than 40 years of smoking, the associations and triggers are tenacious. I guess I can’t change that past. But today I want to change how I respond to those cravings. So I am coming here to set an intention. I shall build new neural pathways. When the grief and homesickness come, I will greet them and care for them, without shutting them out by smoking. Smoking never healed a wound, never brought anyone back that I’ve lost, never made anything better. Returning to bondage and a life of constant poison is not an option.
I will be out of cell range a lot and probably won't be able to post an SOS in real time. So I say it now: NOPE, NOPE, a thousand times NOPE. My quit is too hard-earned to throw it away. When the longing to smoke wells up, I shall channel all you good souls here who cheer each other on and have helped me by explaining things, reassuring me, distracting me, making me laugh, helping me stay accountable. What would you all say? I’ll try to imagine your voices in my head. You’d tell me to keep my quit.
And so I shall.
