Can people share their relapse stories?
My most successful quit was six years ago. (If only I'd stuck with it!) I was 25 and decided I'd had enough. Not for health reasons -- I still felt invincible -- or because of social pressure -- everyone I knew was still smoking at least occasionally -- but because I was poor and couldn't afford it. A pack was up to five bucks in LA, so I was losing over a hundred bucks a month, an astronomical expenditure at the time.
That quit was cold turkey just like this one. In the ensuing years my desperate brain led me to try every other approach -- cutting back gradually, transitioning to the e-cig, the patch, the gum, the patch and the gum, the patch and smoking at the same time because I read it would make you so sick you'd never want to smoke again but of course all it did was make me so sick I took the patch off and then puked and then smoked some more. None of those lasted more than a few weeks, but my cold turkey quit when I was 25 lasted a year. In the lowest moments of this quit I have really hated myself for throwing all that progress out the window. I did it very frivolously, like the not-quite-a-grown-up that I was.
I remember how it started to unravel. My boyfriend was still casually smoking, and for my 26th birthday he bought us a pack. Fun! We smoked the whole thing and I was fine the next day. I was so over it. Reformed. Of course, my roommate was still casually smoking as well, and one night he and I got hammered and went through a pack while having one of those deep, all-night conversations you have before you hit thirty and start caring about sleep more than you care about whether religion and science are compatible or whatever the hell we used to talk about. With that, it was established that it was okay for me and my roommate to smoke together as long as no one else knew about it. Except it was also okay for me and my boyfriend to smoke together as long as no one else knew about it. And my old roommate, who was living alone by then and going through a tough time. And this one co-worker of mine if we were having an especially stressful day.
The next phase was the real killer, though. Soon I decided that it didn't count as long as no one saw me doing it. Before long, I was hiding a pack in my underwear drawer and getting it out every time my roommate left the house. On the drive to my boyfriend's, I'd smoke three in a row while wearing a hood tied tight around my head to keep the smell out of my hair. At this point the only distinction between me and an actual smoker, in my mind, was the fact that I wasn't getting up in the morning and smoking. But soon I was doing that again as well. Just to wake up, or to pass the time in the car on the way to work.
And then it was undeniable that I was smoking again. I couldn't hide it anymore because I could no longer wait more than an hour to have one. Getting back on a pack a day was just like riding a bike.
The majority of Angelenos are transplants, myself included, and normally I'd already be back east doing the holiday thing by now, but the flights were really expensive, so I'm heading out Monday when they are cheaper. Unfortunately, however, everyone I know has left already, including my husband, who went ahead of me to spend some extra time with his dad. I felt the need to write my whole sad-sack relapse story down because I have had the familiar, sneaky thought the past few nights that I could smoke and no one would know. There's no one here to bust me. Even the neighbor, who, it's feasible, could spot me smoking and casually mention it to my husband later, is gone. Right now the only thing between me and giving in -- just one! For fun! With a glass of wine! I'm bored and have nothing to do, and anyway, who would it hurt? -- is this cognitive process of remembering what happened the last time. How innocently it all started and how bad it got. And how picking up a cigarette again didn't feel like a casual, take-it-or-leave-it activity; it felt like the restoration of something that had been painfully missing.
