I can safely admit, here from the other side of day 365, that the [i]very[/i] dangerous 'been there, done that, bought the t-shirt' feeling grows each day, but not visibly. It's a sour spiralling hurricane in the pit of my guts, candy coated and waiting to blow in off the coast onto my lovely beach. I quit smoking over a year ago. It's in the past...or is it? Oh, I get it now. Smoking is the least of what it�s about. Symptoms of quitting smoking? Hah! Smoking [i]was[/i] the symptom.
Damn.
Just when my guard drops, when my confidence grows, those damned EMOTIONS come raging back, this time feeding the realization that every relationship I have has changed over the past year. How do you reorganize a lifetime of how you deal with people? I don't know, but it's been a trying few weeks. Maybe I expected the one year anniversary to wipe away something, clean the slate, make everything sunshine and roses again, but then like a bad dream, the junkie pounces, and strangles my sensibilities with chains of raw emotion. It's exhausting.
My junkie doesn't tell me to smoke. My junkie tells me my life is less than I want it to be (read: crap), and I'm now destined to wait for an upswing. How long am I willing to wait? Until I knock the crap out of my junkie. This is no time for kid gloves. I'm seething right now but I'm ecstatic right now, but I'm mortified right now, but I'm crying, shrieking, focusing. Time to turn back inside. Time to race time on the treadmill. Time to...[i]be[/i].
The shadow of the junkie returns.
This is when we are most at risk of failure.
This is when we must hammer the ax deeper into the ice and keep on climbing.
Bump.
x T
[B]My Milage:[/B]
[B]My Quit Date: [/B]1/1/2007
[B]Smoke-Free Days:[/B] 379
[B]Cigarettes Not Smoked:[/B] 8,717
[B]Amount Saved:[/B] �2,084.50
[B]Life Gained:[/B]
[B]Days:[/B] 32 [B]Hrs:[/B] 7 [B]Mins:[/B] 36 [B]Seconds:[/B] 37