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08-11-07 09:45 AM - Post#335857
I had my last cigarette four years ago around the beginning of June sometime . . . I know this may sound strange, but after years of "trying to quit", I woke up one morning and never had another again . . . and as some have mentioned here, I never really wanted one again either (at least not in a craving kind of way).
I have been training since I was 14-years-old, so often the first thing I did after getting off the stairmill at the end of my workout was go home and have that cigarette. Ah, the paradoxes of being a human being. 
At the end of this month I will have been sober 19 years . . . Those "meetings" for that problem are non-smoking now in California . . . But, back in "the day" we'd all sit around smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, eating doughnuts and talking about how "clean" we were. 
Well, the reason that I bring that up is that for the first many years of my sobriety I used to tell people that I had "tried to quit" drinking and drugs MANY times before I finally "got it". Now I realize that I never REALLY did "try to quit" . . . When the "rubber hit the road" and abstinence got difficult for me, I just really wasn't ready. I had to want being sober more than I wanted a drink . . . And, although I thought that was the case, in 20/20 hindsight it just wasn't true.
The smoking was the same thing for me . . . I guess I hit some point, where I truly wanted to be a non-smoker (not just lip-service and self-deception). This, I found is a question that you can only really answer for yourself and you need not convince anybody else of it. It has to be a desire/decision that exists in one's innermost self. Then, oddly enough, the "quitting" is fairly easy.
- Joel
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