having trouble this morning

I am stuck (note the word choice) on a mountain, no access to
cigarettes if I even were to decide to succumb. The only people around
are oh-so-healthy, that I couldn't bum one were I to want to. (Right
now I just hate fucking healthy balanced people who are emotionally and
mentally stable and have never been addicted to anything and move
through the world with equanimity. *** you and your sensible
portions and single daily glass of red wine ("so good for the heart!")
and 30 minutes of aerobic exercise a day).

Uh ... excuse me for that. Anyway, as a practical matter, unless I
were to find Utah's version of a sherpa and/or camel and driver, there
is no chance of my smoking any time soon.

That said, I have just spent the last 45 minutes weepy, desolate,
actually crying. CRYING for heaven's sake!!! Feeling ALONE without my
cigarette. That no matter what I do - what I eat, or if I nap, or if I
get a massage, no matter what I do 'for myself' it is all going to
suck, I don't want ANY of it, I just WANT TO SMOKE. The neural
pingings in my brain insist, and insist LOUDLY, that if I could just go
stand out with a cigarette whilst surveying this sunrise THEN and only
THEN would I feel content and whole.

I think I am raging against my own insanities as much as I am crying
FOR permission to have a cigarette. I am crying because unlike the
other insanities which plague me THESE I alone induced and nurtured. I
realize that every fucking time I picked up a cigarette I SECURED for
myself that at a future time came when I was standing on a mountain
with a steaming cup of coffee, surveying the landscape and the sky,
feeling the wonder of God's (the Universe, the Order, whatever)
presence, I would simulataneously and irrationally feel the swell of
incomplete-ness, that in my very quest to become full, I would feel I
was missing something integral to the experience.

"Pah" to anyone who says this is not drug addiction. Right now I think
that the ONLY way I can collect myself at all is to let the full
measure of the Beast puff (sorry) it's chest to full height and stare
me down, and for me to respectfully give It its due. For me, to in
any way minimize that which I am Up Against in this is to court
disaster. If this sounds a little anthropomorphic ... well, that is how
it feels right now. When I quit drinking 9+ years ago, I used to FEEL
if there was alcohol around, say, in a friend's house where I was
spending the night. I did not want it, I did not crave it, it did not
call to me. Well past the time that it's siren's song had lost its
hold on my ship I can tell you: I still FELT its presence if it was in
the house. The best way I can describe this is say you are at a party
or a business gathering, someplace with lots of people around, and
someone is there that you cannot stand, are maybe a little afraid of,
or intimidated by, just generally when you think of that person you get
a huge wash of 'less than' You aren't talking to this person at the
gathering and no one else around even knows that these feelings are
going through you (including the subject of your emotional distress).
You go on about your business at the party while simultaneously being
painfully attuned to where he/she is, with whom he/she is talking. what
he/she is wearing etc. And you know IMMEDIATELY if he/she has left.

What is wierd here is that there are no cigarettes around - but what is
around (of course) is the Beast that is within me (because I (all
together now) "take me with me" (the BANE of my existence). It is
actually a strange confluence of circumstances: I don't think I have
ever been in the height of Want in which the object (Drink, Smoke) is
not available. It has forced me to recognize that the locus of the
Beast in inside, not outside.

I cannot take my having quit smoking for granted. I can't act like it
is easy all the time. I have noticed that I haven't even mentioned
having quit to anyone in my real life for well over a week (sorry, we
are talking dog years here) because somehow ... I have shifted from
being proud of having quit to living in such shame for having smoked.
I need to recognize that this is dangerous, self-defeating thinking.
And so classic classic me, omigod. I think I need to tell the people
in my life (here come the tears): "Please try to remember, as silly as
it may seem to you, to tell me you are proud of me for not smoking, and
keep saying it for lot longer than it seems to you like I should need
to hear it, and please say it more often than you think I should need
to hear it. And, oh, flowery, over-the-top verbiage, yeah, those are
good word choices." Because I am sitting in my SHAME, not in my JOY.
***.

Right now I am very grateful for wireless internet. And for your
long-suffering patience. I won't be boarding a pack-animal on hunt for
a 7/11 anytime soon, no worries. I am just really droopy. "Floppit"
as we used to call it when I was a kid.

love, Stephanie

Three weeks, two days, 22 hours, 6 minutes and 52 seconds. 191
cigarettes not smoked, saving $71.76. Life saved: 15 hours, 55 minutes.

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