Stark and Kabuki’s journey to becoming smoke free

So on Friday, Kabuki and I decided to get out of our respective homes and go a-walkin’—to the local Dollarama, of course. What? We love cheap shit. It was a good outing and a great reward for our non-smoking efforts.

Recently the Dollarama added some new items that cost between one and two dollars, to which Kabuki and I take some umbrage. Dollarama used to be the only dollar store in which everything was actually priced at one dollar, as opposed to the fakers that called themselves dollar stores but really had a bunch of cheap junk priced anywhere between one and ten bucks. Boo. Dollarama was the real deal! Until now. It’s called Dollar-ama, not Two-Dollar-ama or Buck-Fifty-rama.

But oh well. Mostly we still love it. I told Michka, I’m taking a bag with me, and I plan to fill it. I did a pretty good job! Kabuki did well too, finding stickers and goodies and a grabby thing that she used to terrorize passing businesspeople on the way home. Oh, Kabuki. Can’t take her anywhere nice. That’s why we go to Dollarama.

The Haul:

You can click on the above photo to see a nifty image map I made of the goods. Just hover your mouse over any item for a brief description. Fun stuff, fun stuff.

We made it through the week!

Kabuki and I are going out for brunch with Michka and The Good Doctor to celebrate.

Yesterday I went for a short walk to the store to get some grape juice to drink with my pizza, since I can’t have wine. It was the first time I trusted myself to go to the store alone and I made it through without buying any cigarettes. Good for me.

I did buy some scratch’n'wins, and won at least some of my money back. That was fun, but I would have preferred the Cash for Life.

Anyway, so the walk there and back was really nice and altogether too short. I was looking forward to today when I had planned to go for a walk with Kabuki, but then she called and said she wasn’t up to it. And instead of going out on my own anyway, I worked until I was plum tuckered and didn’t do any exercise at all. Now I feel like a sloth.

I am trying to figure out how to counter the exhaustion I am feeling daily without turning to new addictions—i.e. caffeine. I don’t drink coffee or soda to speak of and only drink black tea occasionally. So when I took my one major stimulant out of my diet, I left myself susceptible to some serious sleepiness! *Yawn!*

So I am figuring that out. Maybe walks would help. Maybe I should take an hour long break in the day and go for a walk. If the elevators in my building worked at all I might take shorter, more frequent walking breaks, but in this place, that would be a grave waste of time. I do have to figure out how to take breaks from work now that I don’t take them to smoke, but that is a post for another day. I am too tired to get into it right now.

Anyway, M. is going off to do some yoga in a bit so perhaps I shall walk her there and get out of the house after all. I need some air. Is it wrong to admit I kinda hope I will pass a smoker to get a whiff of some delicious second hand smoke?

I kinda thought so, too.

Yesterday I had to get up twice: once at three in the morning to make some phone calls to Europe for work and again in the late morning to face the day. It felt like going through two days at once. Which is to say I was really, really cranky all day. No amount of tea and sen-sens could help me.

I made it through, however, and at the end of the day I decided that I had been such a trooper that I deserved an extra sticker for my efforts.

I love this return to kindergarten-style decoration. It actually is fun. Plus, that rocket ship sticker looks kind of like a vibrator, which cracks me up. Bzzzzzt! Now that would be a nice reward.

But I like more substantial prizes, too. So tonight M. and I are going to order some pizza (which is half reward and half laziness—we had to reorganize our cupboards so everything is everywhere and I don’t feel like having to cook after putting it all away again), and the other night we had some delicious sesame tofu that we ate from our brand-spankin’ new square bowls.

Only $10 for a set of four! Best pack of smokes I never bought.

In addition to rewards, of course, we needed to come up with lists of replacements for cigarettes and strategies for keeping off of the smokes. Different things work for each of us. I prefer things like hot water, tea, mints and chocolate while Kabuki prefers to sleep and take baths.

Here are a few strategies and replacements we came up with for those moments when we feel we are ready to gnaw our fingers to the bones:

Note that neither of us wanted to use cessation drugs or implements such as patches or gum. I have tried that Nicorette shit and man, it nearly *killed* me. I didn’t realize you had to chew it once and let it rest, then chew once or twice more and let it rest… I chewed it like regular gum and it tore the shit out of my throat. Ugh. Never again.

As for patches, I don’t know. I think half of my addiction is in my hands and another third of it in my lips, so the fraction left that the patch would tackle seems less than satisfactory. Plus I wanted to end my relationship with nicotine altogether rather than to wean off. I may be bitchy (I really, really am), but I will be free sooner. Or so the theory goes.

So basically the plan is to tackle the immediate cravings with whatever distractions work the best, whether it’s a good old fashioned sen-sen (I live on these), a nap, or…sex! Whatever works. And in the longer run, keep busy with projects, walks, exercise, and…sex!

We’re also avoiding situations that lead us to want to smoke. So, in essence…everything. Ha! I informed my close friends that I wouldn’t be around for a few weeks, that I needed some cloister-time. No drinking, very little socializing and never at night, avoiding super-rich foods, leaving my taxes for a later time because dude—NO STRESS. That last one is a hard one. It’s a tough time of year. but as Kabuki has said numerous times, there is never a good time to quit smoking.

So we know we’re going to hit the hard moments, no matter how we try to avoid them and no matter how we have planned to deal with them. The next question is, how do we avoid losing our cool? How especially do we avoid taking out our bitchery on our supportive and loving partners (who will of course be the first to bear the brunt of our frustrations)? Well we didn’t come up with very many strategies for that, but I think the ones we have are important:

I have to be careful with using something like baking as a distraction, though. One year when I had quit for a month and was making the cake for the Non-Smoking Fools Party that was to take place on April 1st, the icing didn’t come out as planned and I was freaking out and Michelle was laughing and, well, we almost broke up. It’s funny now, but at the time it was…not. So a note to myself: stick to the easy stuff. Or just buy the cake!

I do think the first option is very important, and I know both Kabuki and I took our partners aside before Q-Day to explain that if in the coming weeks we need to leave the room in a huff for a few minutes or be alone in a corner for a bit, even if this arises mid-conversation or mid-argument, it isn’t because we can’t stand the sight of them or they have offended us greatly at that moment; it is because we need to do something with the moment where we would formerly have gone for a cigarette to do something that is not going for a cigarette. Like leaving the room. Counting to ten. Deep breathing. Reading a book. Blowing some bubbles. Drinking some water. Whatever.

Yesterday I was trying to print something out for Michelle and the printer was acting up, as it has been doing a lot lately. Michelle, eager to read her printout, was asking what the problem was, and in my irritated state I felt very near snapping at her instead of at the computer that was giving me the trouble. So as calmly as I could, I said, “It’s not working; it’s pissing me off and I have to deal with it. So just…don’t talk to me for a few minutes while I figure it out.”

And she was like, “Okay.” And went to change the laundry over, giving me my required moment to fume and then work my shit out. Nobody lost their cool and nobody got hurt. I think that’s a success, no?

One of the first things that any addiction counsellor will tell you to do when quitting smoking is to reward yourself daily for your victories. It’s really something I haven’t done in the past, except to save up money for some distant future prize. I think it’s good to have both long and short term rewards, however, so Kabuki and I came up with a list of some possible ways to treat ourselves.

While we still include long-term goals, such as saving for travel, finding an apartment with a working elevator in the building (me), buying handheld video games and fashionable footwear (her), we also made sure to include some instant gratification. Things like books, magazines, wine and chocolate can be acquired for around the same price or less than what we would have been laying on the counter for a pack of smokes, while things like classes and massages are achieved with a week’s worth of quitting. Trips to Dollarama (I LOVE Dollarama) are cheap yet fun rewards and toasting yourself for making it through the day costs *nothing*. I already rewarded myself a little bit with a couple of books that I have been wanting to get:

I was also going to make a calendar of quitting with creative sticky-note days to mark my progress, but the truth is I was too lazy to get around to it so I went to Dollarama (have I mentioned that I LOVE Dollarama?) instead and got some shiny new stickers to paste on my regular calendar. I have tons of stickers, so I had better stick to this quitting thing, or they will all go to waste. And it’s a sin to waste.

Yay!!

So it’s March 1st, a.k.a. Quit Day!! It was a hard day, but Kabuki and I made it through. We got together last night to go over our plans and get pumped up about quitting. We made plans to keep our minds off of the cravings today; I slept in and had plans with another friend later in the afternoon, then went to get some movies for the evening. Kabuki napped a lot. Napping is good.

It has been a long day, but I do want to set down some of the groundwork for our plan to quit. So I scanned some of the notes from our planning sessions to share here.

Those are the bare bones plans we have made, but the important thing I wanted to put up here is the list of positive benefits to quitting. We didn’t really focus on the health aspects, because those are both obvious and abstract. We wanted to focus on things that mean something to us immediately and personally. I like to have the list here ready for the hard days, so I can just look it up and remind myself.

Unlike many years before, although I had trepidations surrounding my own ability to stick to my plans, I didn’t go into the challenge with dread or sadness. I know there will be hard days, and having a list of things to look forward to helps me to get through those moments.

Tomorrow I’ll share some of our plans for rewards and some of the strategies we have to get through the day-to-day.

Day 1: we made it through the day! Here’s to us.

So Kabuki and I are entering the Canadian Cancer Society’s Driven to Quit challenge…again. It’s the third year for both of us, after a series of variable successes and ultimate failures. But I think it is a great success that we are still trying. And I feel pretty positive about the decision this time.

We have laid out a more detailed plan than we ever have before, listing positive benefits (including and beyond the usual health stuff that really means nothing to you when all you want is just one drag to get you through), planning out alternative strategies and replacements for cigarettes, setting up long and short term rewards and generally offering each other support. We have a good groundwork now and I really think that we can do it this time.

It seems every time I quit it gets easier and harder; while I am better able to put down the smokes for days, even months at a time, I am also somehow more easily able to pick them up again, confident that I will put them down again, next time for good. Success at quitting is a bit of a mixed blessing that way. But I think I am done with that. I’m not getting any younger and my body hurts more than it used to. Time to put away childish things.

So anyway, part of the plan that Kabuki and I have come up with includes supplementing our quit strategies with creative projects, from photo expeditions and video projects to journals and artistic collaborations. In addition, I decided to put some of the strategies and projects up here on this blog, both to share some of the journey with anyone interested and to give myself an outlet that corresponds to my day-to-day life—I spend a great deal of my life, working, socializing, etc., on the internet.

So that’s that. As of March 1st, we’re a couple of quitters. Wish us luck!!