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Confessions of an Ex-smoker
Winning the Battle Against Nicotine By Teri Brown
It's been two years. Two years since I fought off the rigors of addiction and reclaimed my life. Two years that took me to the depths of depression and back, affecting everything I did and everyone around me. What was the addiction? Alcohol? Crack? Heroine? No I was a victim of one of our best-selling legal drugs. Nicotine.
I was born a nicotine addict, though no one knew it at the time. My mother smoked voraciously throughout her pregnancy, and I waited just until I was old enough to sneak cigarettes from her to continue my addiction. I was 13. With that first puff, I was committed. I'd found my niche, my nirvana, my reason for living nicotine.
Sometime in my late teens the world turned against cigarettes, and I found out they were bad for me. Like the wheezing when I laughed wasn't enough of a clue, I needed the surgeon general to enlighten me. I just shrugged my shoulders. No problem. I can just quit, right?
That's when my addiction sat up and screamed, "Surprise!" In the last 20 years, I've tried every program and method known to woman. Hypnotism put me to sleep, and acupuncture was a pain. I could have been enveloped in a giant nicotine patch and still smoked a pack before breakfast.
The withdrawals for the hard-core nicotine addict are brutal. Anxiety, depression, headache, nausea, constipation and difficulty concentrating are just a few of the symptoms I felt. Whenever I tried quitting, I would go from a competent, confident woman to a whimpering, nonfunctional lump of flesh. So I did what most lumps of flesh do under those circumstances I started smoking again.
I think even worse than the physical ramifications of smoking were the emotional consequences of failing over and over again. Nothing like failing to make you feel like, well, a failure.
