I’ve been trying to quit smoking since an unfortunate relapse over ten years ago. The fact that I have tried and failed so many times is something I’ve come to terms with recently. Ironically, these continual and unfortunate failures may actually wind up being what helps me over the hurdle once and for all.
When I was about 20 years old I finally quit a habit that at the time was already nearly eight years running. I know … do the math … it’s terrible. The constant, harsh words of my pulmonary specialist finally brought me to my senses. Several years earlier I was diagnosed with asthma yet still continued to abuse my lungs.
Then one night when I was about 28 or so, I found myself in a downtown NYC Brazilian club called S.O.B.’s during Carnival with a cigarette dangling from my lips. Yes I’m sure at that moment I shrugged it off as merely giving in to the celebratory and free-spirited air of the night. I probably told myself that for many nights after because it wasn’t too long before I was back to my regular quota.
What makes this even more tragic is the fact that I never really liked smoking. I’ve always hated the taste it left in my mouth and the breath it stole from my lungs. OK I admit that there were those moments such as right after a nice shot of whiskey when you’d hear the crackle of the tip as it ignited. When that very first wafting of freshly burned tobacco hit my nose as you took that first drag. But I digress.
It was the second, fifth and twentieth cigarette that would successively disgust and sicken me. Yet I would light ’em up, one after the other like some robot stuck in a loop. Was I really that much of a slave to the addiction of nicotine? Was all the propaganda back in school about how it gets its claws in a person true after all? Well, I can safely say … at least as far as I’m concerned … yes.
So try as I might I would make it just so far into a period of smoke free living and fall hard again. The raising of the prices didn’t do it. The guilt of bumming from friends didn’t do it. Hell not even my health wasn’t enough to keep me clean. There was even a time that I smoked while suffering from a wicked combination of Strep Throat and Bronchitis. If that pain could not deter me then what hope did I have?
Then the other night, as I puffed away on a free pack of Marlboro Lights I got from a bartender at The Goldhawk, I described myself as a ‘failed quitter.’ There was a moment of laughter at the cleverness and I thought nothing further of it until later.
The next morning my lungs were not at all happy with my actions of the previous night. They had me reeling in a pain that spread thru my spine and to the rest of my body. I tried to cough it away but it fought back hard. I spent most of the morning in the fetal position praying to a God who hadn’t heard from me in a long while.
For one brief moment I gathered the strength to crush the remaining cigarettes in that evil free pack and chuck them in the garbage. Then I grabbed a pen and wrote down, “04/26/06 8:19 AM” on a scrap of paper to commemorate the moment. I wanted to remember when I woke up later.
So yes here I am again in throws of quitting, but with a better way to look at it. I feel that by accepting this as a difficult task that many people fail and fail, time and time again takes the pressure off. So I will continue to gleefully call myself a ‘failed quitter’ who is simply trying to go as long as possible without a smoke.
