Smoking

So, many people have asked me, have you quit smoking yet? Have you started again? As I discreetly steal out the back door and puff to my hearts content, only to wake up he next morning with an unbearably sore throat.

The tobacco companies have an ingenious recipe for becoming millionaires, market a legal drug that is highly addictive and associate some glamour with it. Once people are addicted, and as long as it is a socially accepted habit, they just keep coming back for more. How twisted!

My excuse? The booze I suppose. It's only when I have a few drinks that I fully know what its like to be addicted to a drug. It's actually a strange phenomena if you've never experienced it. My body tenses up, and if there's a cigarette in the room, my gaze is fixated upon it and i cannot look away. All thoughts are centered upon how and when I can get a smoke, cost becomes no issue, previous concerns about my health now somehow seem trivial and paranoid. Is it me thinking these silly thoughts?

Well, of course you say, or course its you, who else could it be? Of course, I know that all the thoughts going on in my head come from my own brain, there's no denying that. I'm not crazy, or at least i don't think I am. However, I do think that there can be many different inner dialogues going on inside your head, in my case they're all me, all Anita voices, it's just they dont always agree with each other all the time. Normal right?

But it's only now, when I've decided to quit that I can actually differentiate between two distinct voices going back and forth in my consiousness whenever I'm having a nicotine craving. The voice that is me, Anita, and the voice that is nicotine.

Here is the typical argument that goes on when I'm trying to decide whether to smoke or not.

nicotine: Man, sure would be nice to have a smoke right now

Anita: (Sigh), yep sure would, oh well, I don't smoke anymore remember? It's bad for my health, you know.

nicotine: You can just have one, one cigarette can't hurt you! You smoke joints all the time, what difference can one cigarette a weekend make?

Anita: Well....maybe I could just have one...actually, no, I just have to distract myself with something else right now, I promised myself I wasn't going to smoke, so I'm not going to!

nicotine: There's a pack of cigarettes on top of the fridge, you can go out the back door, nobody has to know about it...

Anita: I'm not going to smoke goddammit! What does it matter if nobody knows about it? I wish I had never touched a cigarette my whole life, I wish they were illegal! Wiped off the face of this earth! I'm not going to smoke, are you that stupid to think I would fall for that!...but actually, all this talk about smoking is making me want to have a cigarette, after all one is not that big of a deal...

nicotine: There's one on top of the fridge..

And this is how it goes.

It's my second attempt at quitting, which should be more successsful than my first. I'm more equipped to deal with temptaion as it comes in all its different forms, but has always the same essence to it, the cunning and evil ways of nicotine!