So I am tackling a bit of my step 2 – health.  A bit is an understatement; I am quitting smoking. I’d quit for over a year a long while back, and it was the hardest thing I’d ever done.  Then, a single cigarette while off on a training weekend for early head start (my kiddo was a foster kid placed with us and had a bunch of interventions before we adopted), just one cigarette, and I was hooked again. Insane.  It was just a few a day, then half a pack for a long time, but it’s been creeping up. Now a decade later, I am quitting again.

I have “wanted” to for a while.  No one around me smokes.  This whole city is extremely smoker unfriendly (unless you are smoking weed, there’s a green cross on every other corner).  I don’t have to reiterate the health dangers of smoking.  We all know those.  The stink, the stained teeth, the example it sets to my kids, even though I’ve always tried to hide it.  Keep it outside, and always away from them, but they aren’t stupid.  And then, there is the cost.  But I really did not want to quit. My desire to keep smoking outweighed all the rest of it.

But now, with my financial concerns, with us even considering that I might need to find a job – I never finished college, and I haven’t held any job outside the home since 1999 – it pushed the balance the other direction.  I’d applied to a college for fall 2017 to go back to school before this and I dunno where that will go at this point.  But I am looking to trim expenses everywhere I can.  6.50 a day in savings, it’s kinda a no brainer.

So, the motivation is there,  but it’s pretty dang awful. The aches, the yo-yo emotions.  Nicotine fills serotonin receptors (and I already have issues with chemical depression so when you mess with my serotonin, woe to those around me), so I am alternatively pissy-irritable and weeping.  The mental fortitude it takes to resist hopping in the car to run to the mini mart, I can’t even describe. It feels like every nerve wants to jump out of my skin, sweating, headachey.  I want to sleep through some of this but I can’t sleep.  I keep busy, and for a moment or three I forget I’ve decided to be a non-smoker. I’ll reach a moment in my routine where I’d typically grab a smoke, almost start to do it and then it hits me.  Oh.  Yeah.  And then I am hit with a wave that I swear feels a lot like grief.  I know it sounds ridiculous but I am in mourning. Most of this should pass in 48 hours they say.  Some people feel it longer, like a couple weeks.  And then I read it could take months. That idea alone is almost enough to make me give up now!  So I’m not thinking about that.

I try instead to focus on the positives.

For now, not smoking in this minute. And not the next minute either. I jut gotta keep doing the thing I don’t think I can do.  No problem, right?