Before it was a lonely feeling it was a guilty feeling
I’m not quite sure I understand myself and what sort of changes I’ve experienced lately that have been overwhelmingly positive. I didn’t hit a jackpot. I didn’t inherit a large sum of money or real estate property. I just sort of reset my addictions through getting tired of the discomfort those addictions were making for me. Apologies if I am not speaking very clearly. Like I said, it makes sense that I’m not quite sure I understand myself.
So I… I just don’t have the same attachment style because I am basically forced to learn new ways to cope — that is what my mind believes, whether genuinely or instinctually or a combination of both. There was something bad happening with my physical health and I wanted it to stop. That’s all I can say. That’s the most I can say.
Quitting alcohol helped, probably. Most likely. I really do think that was smart. It took me that long! Geez, 10–15+ years. The alcohol was…. It was…
No, it was just that… I forgot why it was bad for me. I think that’s what happens with addictions. You forget why it is bad. Easy enough to forget that the body rejects cigarettes at first; you get lightheaded and nauseated; it’s literally a poison. Well, so be it. If it weren’t such an annoying process to quit nicotine and tobacco, I’d want to smoke it more often. Which is a funny thing to say. It takes 3–4 days of having that annoying draining nagging feeling. It’s easier to tell that voice, figurately speaking, to shut up by just smoking a damn cigarette.
Eventually over five million introspective years of torment, I took the hint and told the nicotine cravings to wait 3 to 4 days. I did that, not the nicotine. I took control. I like control. I guess when my health started failing from the former alcoholism stint I was involved in with myself, when you have no control over your failing health, you suffer from fear all the damn time. It’s scary.
No shit it is.
I did establish how the panic attacks, the reoccurring panic attacks, altered my judgment of my own character in the sense of being afraid to continue doing what I was doing. They were reoccurring because I wasn’t taking the hint for the longest. I kept drinking, kept smoking. Eventually, yeah, I had to appeal to sobriety by asking myself what I could do to not live in fear of dying all the time.
No magical answer short of dealing with the last addiction I formed and work backwards. As I confessed, I realized the alcohol addiction was much deeper than I thought and expected. It had branches back to when I began drinking casually a few times a week and didn’t ever stop for longer than a week or so — turns out I really needed to get past the sacred two-week mark…
Anyway. After doing that and making it past the sacred two-week mark, well, I thought to quit cigarettes for two weeks and only vape. I ended up catching a nasty head cold that made it too awful to vape; the moisture from the vape clouds was so irritating I’d cough and cough. I had a cigarette and that fucking helped. It made me realize how paradoxical that whole shit is about smoking and vaping — why was smoking now better for me when sick? No, really. It cleared up my sinuses temporarily. (Thinned the mucus lining.) Whereas, the fucking vape… The vape was just so offensive and harsh when I was sick. I think a weird connection was made and a click sound inside my brain. Let me consider the usage of tobacco to have a medicinal property to it: it is helping me cope through this terrible… flu… Now, when I am healthy again, I don’t think I will physically feel bad enough to need a cigarette. Maybe let me get this nicotine out of my system once I start to feel better. That’s all.
I could elaborate more, but I don’t need to keep justifying myself… Maybe another time I could go more deep into it. Overthinking was actually bad for my health. So now I see where I get stressed about wanting to articulate things, and just slowly let off the accelerator and coast.
