As those close to me know I quit smoking right before New Year’s. This was partly for general health reasons, and partly at the urging of someone, and I was pretty successful — or so I thought — at kicking the habit. Until last week. I decided to smoke again and put plans of quitting on the back burner for a while.
Now some people may well think that this is related to Thursday’s entry, and in a way it is — and it isn’t. I actually started on that Tuesday. Being a non-smoker just wasn’t the thing for me. In a way I think that my short stint at not smoking cost me, and cost me dearly.
To backtrack — I have been a smoker since I was 13-14. That’s easily most of my life; and although there have been times when I have banished tobacco from my daily life I have kept coming back to it. There was even a period of one year, between November 2004 and November 2005, when I did not smoke at all. And yet something kept drawing me back.
Plainly put, while not smoking I suffered from paralyzing anxiety. I was forever going around with a cloud of doom hanging over myself, and a strong feeling of paranoia. It was a bit as though existence was too “heavy”, in a way — I needed strong feelings to urge me onwards. And for a while recently I had those strong positive feelings like a wind at my back.
However in the past month those feelings faded, and I became very reclusive, closing myself in on myself. Gradually I was almost losing my ability to operate on a daily basis. I was getting moodier and finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate on my daily tasks because of anxiety, and of course that realization merely made me more anxious and unable to operate, like a vicious circle. Eventually I wrote that “breakup” blog entry, which eventually ended up costing me a lot more than I thought.
You see it was evidently read by a certain someone who didn’t like its contents, not necessarily in the way one would obviously assume though. Let’s just say it lead to closed doors and me spending a pretty miserable birthday weekend intensely depressed and by myself. Now, the reason for that is complex and ultimately this was due to certain factors which would have eventually come out of the woodwork and plagued the relationship anyway (I think), but the point is that I didn’t need to write that publicly and I certainly shouldn’t have. If I hadn’t I would have had at least a much better weekend. When you get to be my age you don’t want to spend your birthday in a way that reminds you of the chance you have that you’ll die alone, but that’s been my spectre all weekend; I would rather have continued deluding myself about that.
And why did I write that? Anxiety and paranoia that would let me think about nothing else than the fact that this girl I like didn’t seem all that eager to see me. It was a bit of catharsis, but one that would have been better left as a private (unpublished) entry. Looking back I am kicking myself for that. I was made aware of some realities that would probably have been made plain to me later on as a result of making that entry public, but obviously it would have been better to get those clarifications in person rather than through email.
So, where does smoking fit into this? Well last week I picked up a pack of cigarettes and smoked one while on break, and when I got back to my work desk I was feeling better. A lot better. I found that I could put my personal fears and doubts behind me and concentrate on work. My work abilities were no longer sapped by my fears.
And then I remembered that I had felt exactly that way when I started smoking again in 2005. At that time I had started a new job and was very anxious about THAT. For some reason lighting up made it easier for me to face the challenges of a new job where I would have to take charge of things, and even made me enthusiastic to take on the new challenge. It took me from a fearful quivering mass and made me productive again. And that was after a year of not smoking. I hadn’t used nicotine patches for months by that point, so I doubt it was directly related to nicotine addiction, and I had gotten rid of the habit aspect by then.
So, it must have been something else. I don’t know what it is, but not smoking just doesn’t do it for me. Maybe if there was something to replace it I could do without tobacco — and in certain circumstances I have gone a weekend without even thinking about lighting up, although the likelihood of such weekends is rather low at the moment — but until I actually find that replacement thing I’ll be the guy with the smokes. Because I am a better, more sensible person for it.