I encountered my first obsession when I was eleven years old.
I’d been sent to church by my mother on this Sunday morning and was trudging down a large hill as I began the ten-block walk when a girl I didn’t know, who seemed to be about my age, stopped me.
“This will help,” she said, holding something out to me. Ooh. A cigarette. My first ever.
It started with strong feelings of attachment, but within a year, I was hooked. Addicted, though I never called it that.
I was in love. I’d found my first self-medicating substance, a way to assert myself, and a round-the-clock friend in a world in which I felt alone.
The stranger was right; cigarettes helped.
For many years I smoked. Happily. In a world of other smokers. It didn’t hurt that I became a writer—who could judge a journalist or author for smoking? Not me!
After my son Shane passed, smoking became a comfort even as the rest of the world moved away from cigarettes. In the years that followed, I underwent a few disastrous and devastating surgeries that took their toll on my physical health. The doctors wrote me off—they told me the next stop was the morgue. I thought, Well, Beattie, let’s smoke it up.
By the time I turned seventy-five, I still hadn’t made it to the morgue—but I was still smoking. Mostly happily. But there was smoking fallout: I didn’t fit into society; I no longer smoked in the house; I felt . . . ashamed.
My daughter had recently quit smoking, and I felt embarrassed around friends. I was the last living smoker, or so it seemed. I decided to quit. Time to let that go too.
After getting a referral to the “best hypnotherapist for stopping smoking”—the one all the addicted “kids” from AA saw, I tackled quitting. Serious quitting. For the first time since that Sunday on the hill when I was eleven.
Nine times I failed, reaching for cigarettes again and again because I couldn’t endure not smoking. Ten times I went back to the hypnotist, told him the truth, and asked for a repeat. Although even he couldn’t understand why I kept going back, he tolerated me. I also sensed he believed in me, as did my family.
I prayed often and hard through this time, wanting mostly to quit. It was a process—in the truest meaning of the term. I needed to apply myself as persistently to quitting smoking as I did when I stopped using drugs so many years before. The “Big Book” calls it HOW—honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness to try. Well, I persistently kept trying.
The tenth time it took—no more last cigarettes, no more entertaining ideas about occasional smoking. I said goodbye to cigarettes, one of the greater loves of my life. I want to say it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it’s not. I’ve done many very difficult things.
It’s been more than a year now without smoking. While I miss the role cigarettes played in my life and still occasionally yearn for a good sit-down in the sun, in my front yard, with a smoke, I don’t want to go back. Not really. Becoming relieved of the obsession was a major endeavor, both for my Higher Power and me, and I don’t want to mess with it.
Appreciate the work we’ve done to free ourselves from obsessions and active addictions. If we fall down nine times, the solution is simple: swallow our pride, tell the truth, and get back up one more time than we fall.
The amount of times we fail isn’t what we judge ourselves by. How many times we get back up is what makes us spiritual warriors and winners.
Today if any addictions or compulsions are haunting me, I’ll begin to tackle overcoming them. I’ll persist and get back up one more time than I fall.