“Giving up smoking is really good for your health,” they said.
“Giving up smoking will put years on your life and make you feel like a million dollars,” they said.
I beg to differ, but I’ll tell you why a bit later.
If you look at the date of this entry and the one that precedes it, you’ll realise I haven’t exactly been peppering the blogosphere with my thoughts about giving up. That’s because in terms of nicotine addiction I haven’t had many thoughts for quite a while.
Nearly three months in, I hardly even think about tobacco. My own smoking, which began while I was in junior school and continued throughout my adult life, seems now to be something that happened to another person entirely. The other day I took part in a photo session for a Swindon Advertiser spread about giving up. Part of it entailed my holding a lit cigarette – of my old brand – and stubbing it out.
Apart from an easily-suppressed reflex telling me to bend my arm and put the Lambie into my mouth, I felt nothing. It’s just as well I don’t update this blog every day, because if I carried on in this vein I’d give you the impression I was one of those insufferable non-smokers who proclaim how easy it is to give up, and how weak-willed those still on the tabs are. I always despised people like that when I was smoking, and I despise them now.
Yes, giving up smoking is very easy in my experience – but only if the time has come for you to give up. As I said in the article that accompanied the pictures the other day, if you try to give up for any other reason than that you have simply had enough, you are in for a tough time.
If you fail, it does not mean you are a weak person; it simply means that, for you, the time is not yet right. Do not beat yourself up and – above all – do not imagine that you will never be able to stop.
Obviously, the sooner the time is right for any given smoker, the sooner they can give up a deadly and wasteful habit, but that’s entirely a matter for the individual.
Mind you, if it’s any comfort to those still struggling with nicotine, I may have got off lightly when it came to withdrawal symptoms, but there have been other difficulties.
At the beginning of this entry, I said I’d been told that giving up would be good for my health and make me feel like a million dollars.
To tell you the truth, lately I’ve spent rather a lot of time coughing myself more or less inside out and feeling not so much like a million dollars as like a grubby one dollar bill that’s been dropped into a mucky gutter, gnawed by a rat and used as a blanket by a family of cockroaches.
Apparently one is susceptible to more coughs and colds during the first few months after giving up.
Or maybe the tar was the only thing holding me together.