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, please -- join us!
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If you don't want to do something, one excuse is as good as another. - Yiddish Proverb
The person who really wants to do something finds a way; the other person finds an excuse. - Author Unknown
I had hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of reasons why I couldn't quit smoking over the years.
At the beginning, of course, I didn't want to quit; I still enjoyed it and it hadn't done any major health damage yet, and I socialized with smokers, so it didn't even occur to me to come up with reasons to quit. Sure, there was that easily-ignored warning in tiny print on the side of the pack, but I was young and of course that warning didn't apply to ME, personally, but to some older, sicker smoker.
A few years in, when it became clear that quitting wasn't as simple a prospect as I'd assumed it would be, certain phrases began to creep into my conversation: "...yeah, I gotta cut down," or "...I know I should probably quit, but..." You've been there. You know the drill.
Around the time I realized I'd been smoking for nearly a decade, as 30 loomed on the horizon, it started to occur to me that I might want to take some concrete steps to stop smoking. The social pressure to quit wasn't quite as bad then as it is now, but it was building. I had a job in public health and felt like a hypocrite every time I went out for a smoke break. Nonsmoking friends would wave away my smoke in bars and ask if I was thinking of quitting. By then, the answer was yes, but it was always a qualified yes.
"Yeah, I've been cutting back lately."
"Yeah, I know, it's awful. I don't smoke as much as I used to but I definitely need to quit these things. Ugh!"
"Yeah, I really need to quit. I've just been so stressed out by [insert reason here] that it's been hard. But soon!"
Excuses, excuses.
I was halfway through my thirties before I allowed my brain to recognize that my smoking habit was really an addiction to nicotine, and that I was behaving like an addict when I tried to rationalize continuing to smoke. In fact, I'd finally resolved to do something about it, at long last, and be done with it before I turned 35.
Unfortunately, that deadline turned out to be flexible, as I continued to make excuses -- mostly to myself -- for not quitting. I kind of surprised myself at the endless supply of reasons (excuses) why I couldn't (wouldn't make a serious attempt to) quit. Family stress. Work stress. The everyday stress of urban life. Long commutes. Routines and habits. Curbing my appetite. The impact I imagined quitting would make on my own self-image and creative muse. And did I mention the stress?
The most toxic excuse is the one that still makes me mad to this day. I was in a relationship at the time with an unapologetic chain-smoker (not the happiest of relationships, for any number of reasons), and I used the relationship stress AND proximity to someone with no interest in quitting to impact my own resolve to quit. For almost FOUR YEARS after that mid-thirties quit impulse - arrgh!
And, because this is the way the addiction process warps your reasoning, for over a year after I'd broken off the relationship. I let my excuses carry me past that final line in the sand I'd drawn, to not be a smoker in my forties. Too much stress, too much work, too much pressure, too many Republicans doing awful things, too many hours in a weekend, too many temptations behind the convenience store counter...there were always, always, always excuses.
Until, just over a year into my forties, as I was going about my just-as-stressful-as-ever life, someone made a half-assed suggestion to quit that day, and for whatever reason, that little switch flipped in my brain and something said Okay. Now. Now it's time. And it was. I was done. No more excuses -- at least, no more excuses for smoking. The rest is a work in progress.
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