Shut Up Just Shut Up Shut Up

When I'm more comfortably quit, I'll put up a post about why it is that I love smoking cigarettes. Because much as I hate to admit it, I really do love the act and culture of smoking. But the thing that motivates me to quit each time--and which I slowly forget about over the course of months, years--is how much I torture myself about smoking.

If I could remain the carefree smoker I was in college, proudly flashing my Camel Lights pack like a shield when my nosy hall mates chided me for my habit, I'd probably he happy to ignore all of the very sensible reasons to quit and just continue along my merry, smoke-ring-ing way.
I can't do that, though.

Sometime around late 2003, I began to beat myself up about smoking. I tortured myself at the end (just the end at first) of every smoke break and gradually, I began to chastise myself at the first sign of a nicotine craving, at every little hiccup in my breath, at every cough that woke me in the night, at every surprising sniff of my own belongings, which revealed the scent of a smoker. And since then, I haven't been able to ease up on myself.

There's something inside me now that fights hedonism in all its forms, be it eating, smoking, drinking, lazing, shopping, sex. There is a constant, interior war between the part of me that needs to indulge in order to loosen up and the part of me that sees virtue in control. I was going to write "control and self-care," but the reason why this do-gooder voice inside me is infuriating is because I believe that self-care involves hedonism to some extent. Hopefully not the cancerous kind, sure, but my inner critic doesn't seem to notice the difference between dangerous pleasures and the kinds of pleasure that make us human and furthermore, make us happy to keep being human.

I loathe that controlling voice. It begins to rule me so that I get more stressed about my habit and more disappointed in myself. Then, I feel so lousy that I smoke more. So of course I beat myself up quite thoroughly for caving and so the cycle continues. If there is anything I wish to escape by staying quit this time around, it is that completely uncomfortable self-loathing. The myriad pleasures I experience while smoking a cigarette aren't worth the way I feel about myself immediately after having done so. It's strange to admit that I am not quitting because of cancer or emphysema or smelling bad or gum disease or social stigma or finances or an ultimatum from someone I love. It's much simpler than that, really, and moderately hedonistic: I am quitting to starve the judgment inside me.