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! We kindly ask that politics be set aside.
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Note: this is the diary I wrote for Sunday, but haven't been able to post until now. My laptop is still hosed but I have another machine today so I'm going to give it a shot. I signed up for this in yesterday's thread but I don't think it got picked up in last night's diary. Ah well. That kind of week!
It's been cold here lately...temperatures hover in the single digits in the mornings, rise to the twenties during the day, and drop again as it grows dark. As I scuttle along the sidewalk toward my bus stop, I'll sometimes catch a glimpse of myself reflected in the big plate glass windows of the local Starbucks; when it happened on a particularly frosty morning early last week, my reflection actually startled me: I had smoke coming out of my mouth.
Well, not SMOKE smoke, it was actually just my warm breath condensing in the cold air. But it was the first time I'd seen myself with a cloud of "smoke" around me in years and it was jarring, even if it was all a perfectly innocent phenomenon of nature and not the result of a habit that kept me puffing out great clouds of the toxic stuff for years and years.
It looked weird.
It didn't even feel as though I was looking at myself; that's how disconnected I felt from the image of the woman exhaling a cloud of white vapor. On the surface, anyway, I'm a nonsmoker. I avoid the little huddle of freezing smokers in the doorway near my bus stop. I stand upwind, glad my "smoking hand" isn't freezing. For the most part, I've internalized my status as someone who doesn't smoke.
Yet in that moment, from out of nowhere, came a little pang of guilt. Guilt for all the years of abusing my own health, for all the money wasted, for all the people I inconvenienced or harmed with my smoking, for the self-inflicted misery and frustration of not being able to quit. For a few seconds, I felt like a smoker, mad at herself for still smoking.
Obviously, on some level, I hadn't let it go completely.
When you hear someone talking about something being "nothing but smoke and mirrors," you know they're referring to something insubstantial or illusory. A magician (or a politician) uses tricks and misdirection -- smoke and mirrors -- to deceive or distract. But mirrors have always done quite the opposite for me -- if anything, they reveal too much. I think they sometimes show us something we don't necessarily want to see: the truth.
As a smoker, mirrors were my enemy. The "glamorous" smoking you see in old movies? Not the way you look when you smoke (unless of course you are a glamorous movie star, in which case, lucky you! You can skip the rest of this rumination).
The few times I was forced to see myself puffing away (a mirror above a bar, a poorly-placed hotel mirror, the reflective window of a coffee house or cafe or parked car) and allowed myself to see -- really see -- what I looked like, it wasn't pretty. There was a reason why I removed mirrors and hung sheer curtains in the windows near the places I used to smoke. I couldn't stand watching myself do it!
I mean let's face it, humans do look a little odd with smoke pouring from various orifices, objectively speaking. The act of smoking may be accompanied by various facial contortions that eventually help etch those lines around your mouth, your eyes, between your eyebrows. Not an attractive sight.
But more than that, I think on some level that I didn't like to see myself smoking because it would have forced me to think -- really think -- about what I was doing. Prolonging an addiction is so much easier when you can put it out of your mind, to do what it is you do almost unconsciously, to never allow yourself to observe and acknowledge your own behavior. If I didn't see myself smoking, it was just that much easier to avoid acknowledging that I was smoking (and therefore avoid feeling bad about it).
"I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes - it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach." - Maya Angelou
I wish I'd read this years ago, and gotten down to the business of forgiving myself.
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