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. If you are quitting or thinking of quitting (or want to support quitters), please - join us! We kindly ask that politics be left out.
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I’ve never been particularly goal-oriented or driven in the classic, Type A, “going to be a VP by the time I’m 30 and retire at 50” kind of way. I’m not even goal-oriented in the “lose ten pounds before the reunion” kind of way. Not for me the overly ambitious annual New Year's Resolution; I'd rather have a sort of vaguely goal-ish thing in mind and meander in that general direction (unless something more interesting comes along to distract me, like a bird encountering a shiny object, or a dog spotting a squirrel).
I always hope for the best, of course...and I'm just disciplined enough to do the research and figure out what it might take to get where I'm fairly sure I need to go, so my life isn't one big, confusing series of random detours and unexpected situations.
Well, not entirely, anyway.
Sure, my post-secondary education was full of fits and starts and unfinished dead-ends, I don't have the home life I envisioned at 20 (or 30, or 40), and my career path defies description (seriously...I tried, just now, and failed utterly, and I lived through it!), but I usually operate with at least a general sense of what I'm aiming for and how to get there, given my circumstances and resources at the moment.
When it comes to the big life changes we all face---or embrace---and the over-arching life decisions we all make, some of us do indeed state those goals and make those lists and tick off the milestones as we go along, working through the list with predictable, and predictably gratifying, progress. I am full of admiration (and not a small amount of envy) for folks who can pull that off, 'cause I sure can't, at least not in such a linear fashion. I'm all about the fits and starts, lurching forward quite rapidly at times, but more often humming along in neutral until I figure out my next move.
Despite my exceptional talent for getting in my own way, I have managed to do a lot of things that I'd set as goals over the years: I did go to school in Europe for a while, and I've traveled the world, which I'd wanted to do since I was a kid. I've been paid to write and to draw, two things I'd always loved to do and what had passed for my vague "career goals" (such as they were) growing up. And I was surprisingly successful at quitting smoking, even managing to pull off a cold turkey quit (we'll just ignore the decade-plus that it took me to get from "hey, I should really quit" to "I'm not a smoker anymore").
I had a lot of reasons to quit: health and social and political reasons, and, let's be honest, the infernal expense of the things. I absolutely hated spending such a big chunk of my hard-earned money on something so bad for me...it was like adding insult to injury. A visual thinker, I couldn't help but picture myself literally setting money on fire, and when I added up the amount I'd spent over the years, it was a distressingly large pile of money I had to envision going up in smoke.
So I had this little brainstorm when I quit: I'd save my "smoking money" (since I wasn't used to having it to spend on other things) and just stash it away, and maybe, at long last, I'd be able to save up enough for one of my other goals: to own my own house. I'd never been able to save much of anything as a smoker; there simply wasn't a lot of disposable income left over after my fixed expenses (which happened to include about 1.5-2 packs of cigarettes a day...and those babies weren't getting any cheaper!), and I'd been tossing money into a landlord's pocket since 1981. But if I just took that "cigarette money" and put it in an account where it magically transformed into "house money," in a few years, I'd be able to go house shopping.
There were hiccups in my foolproof plan, of course: first, my imperfect grasp of personal credit and the nuances of building a good FICO score; then the housing bubble and subsequent economic crash. There was the occasional financial emergency (getting laid off; temping for half my usual take-home pay; unexpected medical and dental expenses) that set me back temporarily. But I mostly stuck to it, and over the years, the nest egg got bigger and more downpayment-sized, until a couple of months ago, everything started to come together. My credit was as good as it was ever going to be, and I could meet the newly strict lending guidelines. Interest rates weren't getting any lower, and house prices had bottomed out in my area. It was time.
And so, after a last-minute flurry of crazy activity and way too much paperwork and not a lot of sleep and an eyebrow that twitched non-stop for a solid week, I sat in a room last Friday and handed over a big honking certified check to a lawyer, who then handed me the shiny, slightly used keys to my new house.
The house that GUS bought.
Who's your little buddy?
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