Well, ultimately the most difficult thing about avoiding/quitting smoking is this: througout history, cool people have generally been smokers: James Dean, Keith Richards, Jimi Hendrix, Jack Kerouac, Babe Ruth, Richard Price, Abbie Hoffman, Rod Serling, Frank Zappa, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, all smokers.

Who do the anti-smoking people have? Tony Randall.

The smokers win.

Well, ultimately the most difficult thing about avoiding/quitting smoking is this:

Nicotine is addictive.

So's anything enjoyable. Life is a sexually communicated terminal disease. I say embrace it.

*passes out heroin-laced cigarettes, vodka-infused sex toys, and chocolate-covered pornography to local teenagers*

okay, jon, but I want you to keep in mind that you don't own this topic... people can say other things about quitting without you repeating your mantra each time they comment, right?

My gf quit last Sunday for her birthday. She's had a chronic cough that we assume is detox, but, other than that, she's had nary a side effect. She smoked a pack a day, so she either has unbelievable willpower or a very unique physiology that never really got addicted.

Either way, I'm intensely proud of her.

That's awesome, mike.

Yay mike's gf!

I got the gum last night, so toady, it's on.

I really don't want to talk about it, though, because it'll make me want to do it. I think. I'm ok so far.

A cigarette is a pipe with a fire at one end and a fool at the other.

I used to be on again, off again and have my moments of weakness during times of duress... but I've come to realize it is the most pathetic gesture, a government-subsidized micro-suicidal act which will only result in you losing time in which you could be doing the things you love, with the people you love. There's nothing glamorous about the black lung or any of the necessary rituals surrounding the life of a smoker.

Thankfully there are natural substances that provide actual benefits to our cognitive disposition without destroying our bodies over our lifetime - unlike alcohol and tobacco.

The writer was justified in viewing the habit as a relationship; however I prefer to imagine it in more justified terms... something like an anal gang-rape at the hands of Phillip Morris? They really shouldn't have taken ""Veni Vidi Vici" off of their coat of arms logo... they obviously have no shame.

okay, jon, but I want you to keep in mind that you don't own this topic... people can say other things about quitting without you repeating your mantra each time they comment, right?

Right. I would've answered sooner, but I was outside smoking.

appidyfoo, I don't know why this is, but anti-smoking screeds (even during the 8-months I quit smoking) always rubbed me the wrong way. They made me want to smoke. They always sound so..paternalistic. We're big boys and girls, we know smoking is bad for us. We choose to do it anyway. It's that simple.

We choose to do it anyway. It's that simple.

Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to its vomit.

Did you read the link, jon? It wasn't an anti-smoking screed.

*column of light appears from the sky*

Oh, your bon mot has made me seen the error of my ways. I shall now quit smoking. Drinking, too. and sweets, and fatty foods, and pornography, and pot, and television and impure thoughts.

(dude, people quit when they want to quit, period. all the propoganda in the world won't change that. Usually it just makes people dig their heels in deeper)

pode: I know. I was referring to appidydafoo's comments.

jon, has it ever occurred to you that ins ome ways, maybe you're a prisoner of your own need to rebel?

miko, it's got nothing to do with rebellion. The anti-smoker fervor wouldn't bother me so much if I thought most of it had anything to do with concern for people's health rather than vague anti-corporate politics or a need to feel superior. I am completely cognizant of the fact that many of the things I enjoy are taking years off my life (theoretically), but life is more fun with them than without them.

ANYway. Sorry to participate in derail. I don't think people do this out of a need to feel superior; certainly they need to reinforce their choice to do something difficult, but if you are feeling judgement when you read these things, the judgement might not be coming from the writer. You know?

I liked this essay. When I quit, part of the program I used required you to actually write a farewell letter to your habit. Sometimes people would share them; they were all quite poignant in this way. Smoking's always some sort of crutch, and it gets deeply ingrained into people's lives as they lean on it, in whatever way, to help them function. Letting them go is definitely like letting go of a bad relationship, which, though you finally recognize is hurting you, you are still sad to have to give up on.

I'm gonna post a couple from the message board there, 'cause you can't direct link.

They always sound so..paternalistic. We're big boys and girls, we know smoking is bad for us.

It's a drag when issues with authority figures prevent people from being able to recognize good advice. I mean, I find most anti-smoking ads kinda irritating myself, but that doesn't invalidate the truth therein. (Aside: lots of anti-smoking campaigns are funded by tobacco companies. Would I sound like a conspiracy theorist if I suggested that, maybe, sometimes, the ads are intentionally irritating and ineffective?)

We choose to do it anyway. It's that simple.

Well, yeah, except for the many people who would like to quit, but find themselves unable to.

I really want to chime in here, but jonmc is speaking for me just fine.

WTF? There is a server problem at my job, and I've had more duplicates this week from it. Argh. Anyway. Here's a little sampling of this sort of letter. It's really a cathartic process for a lot of people, clearly.

Letter I
Dear Cigarettes:
We have been together for over 36 years and I will really miss you. However, you are killing me and stealing what little money I have to spend. I will miss you when I am stressed-out and angry at work each day. I will miss you after a beer. I will miss you after eating a meal. I am quitting to save my life. I don’t want to end up with lung, mouth and/or throat cancer. I don’t want to end up carrying around an oxygen tank in my golden years. I don’t want my chest cut open for cardiac bypass surgery. Therefore, you must go. All good things must come to an end.

Letter II
Dear Cigarettes,
I think it would be best if we didn’t see each other anymore. This has been a really hard decision for me. I still remember all the times that you helped me to feel better when I was upset or angry. When I was bored you gave me something to do. I could always count on you when I was overwhelmed and in need of a break. And boy did we have some good times at parties!
It’s just that over the years you have become too controlling. I hate how you make me feel bad if I don’t see you every few hours. I don’t like how you always decide what restaurants or hotels I go to. I can’t even watch an entire movie without you bothering me. No matter where I am or what I’m doing, I have to plan out a time to see you. I’m so tired to spending so much of my time and my money on you.
Over time, I have come to believe that this is an extremely unhealthy relationship. My parents have been saying it for years (you know they’ve never really liked you). The older I get, the more I notice the effects of this relationship. I really believe this relationship is killing me, and its time for you to go.
I don’t really expect you to understand all of this, and I’m sure you are going to make it very hard for me to let you go. I know you are going to show up when I’m stressed or depressed and promise to make it all better. I expect you to wake me up in the middle of the night, and harass me all morning. I expect that you will try your best to make my life miserable for awhile. You’ll probably even try to get to me through our mutual friends. I want you to know right now that it is not going to work. I’m not going to let you in no matter what you do.
This is the last time that you will hear from me. Goodbye cigarettes! Christine

Letter III
Dear Marlboro,
At the risk of hurting you, I feel I must. After all, you've been hurting me for the past 12 years. Frankly, I've had quite enough of you.
I will miss how you've gotten my out of some uncomfortable situations, how you've given me a few moments to myself when family members are too much to handle, enjoying you with a beer or two, and of calming my nerves after a long and stressful day.
I most definately will not miss the headaches and migranes you gave me, the way you smell, the stains you've put on my clothes and teeth, the way you make my lungs feel, and the terrible cough you've given me. You've made me look much older than I should and you're way too expensive for my taste.
I look forward to getting my sense of smell and taste back. Without you sabatoging my efforts, I'll be able to walk without getting winded and I'll finally be able to save money instead of spending it all on you!
So goodbye forever! I know forever is a long time, but take it day by day. You will no longer have me wrapped around your little filter. You'll get used to not having me around, and I know I'll enjoy life more without you in it.

Letter IV
Dear cigarettes,

It's been 20-year relationship, but it's time to end it. I will miss having you as an excuse to take a break. I'll miss sitting on my balcony watching the sunrise while smoking and waiting for my morning coffee to brew. It will feel very awkward not to follow my periodic, habitual smoking routine. And I'll really miss the way I use you to relax when I'm stressed or anxious.

But I won't miss the way you make me and my clothes smell. I won't miss the taste you leave in my mouth. I won't miss running out of breath too quickly. I've developed a smoker's cough over the last year or so so and I *know* that's just the beginning of how dangerous you are to my health. Heart disease is the number one killer of women, and there's some history of it in my biological family. I've been watching my diet and taking niacin to lower my cholesterol. I've also been trying to exercise, but I find it hard when I run out of breath quickly. It's hard even to motivate myself to exeercise so long as I keep smoking because I know that you are more dangerous to my heart than an unrestricted diet with no exercise.

I started this self-destructive relationship twenty years ago as a teenage act of rebellion. I'm long past being a teenager and there's no longer any need for rebellion. Nor is there any desire for self-destruction. I don't want the social "pariahdom" (I sincerely doubt that's a word :)) that comes with smoking these days. I want to save the $800+ a year and I sure as he** don't want to support the tobacco industry any longer!

There are better, healthier ways to take a break, watch a sunrise and relax. Most of all, I CAN quit now and there isn't a single good reason to continue to smoke. So goodbye cigarettes. I'll miss you, but I'm quitting tomorrow.

Janet

I shall now quit smoking. Drinking, too. and sweets, and fatty foods, and pornography, and pot, and television and impure thoughts.

Do you perceive all of these activities and their consequences as absolute equals? I'm not here to argue or convince you of anything, I am simply thinking out loud. I used to smoke a pack a day, so really... I couldn't care less about relaying an anti-corporate mindset or feelings of inferiority during our dialog... in fact, I'd find it to be a quaint notion that someone would participate in an online discussion about such a subject with those goals in mind... it seems rather farcical. Not to say impossible...

I am completely cognizant of the fact that many of the things I enjoy are taking years off my life (theoretically)

Smoking related illnesses are theoretical?

Miko, I've deleted your double.

Jon, you're on the verge of a time-out, or just an out; this shouldn't be a surprise to you.

I like Christine's letter and I empathize with it. I was just sitting here thinking about how much I wanted a cigarette (yeah, almost 7 weeks after quitting) and how, if I still smoked, I would go outside and I would just LOVE that cigarette and it would LOVE me back and perhaps we would twirl around together in a dreamy minuet, just me and my murderous lover. Fuck it.

The first linked blog piece is okay; yeah, we all feel like that. Cigarettes, when you're well and truly hooked, as I have been for the majority of my adult life (I took some time off to have babies and here & there as an act of willpower or fear) are your lover. I'm slowly beginning to realize that they've been my main emotional coping mechanism all these years - when I'm angry I reach for a smoke. When I'm happy I reach for a smoke. Ditto tired, bored, malicious, cheerful, energetic - everything. And they were my little reward for a task completed, my goodnight friend: the last thing I did before bed and, of course, the accompaniment to my morning coffee. Longest relationship of my life, really. Now I don't smoke anymore (shut UP. Except for when I'm out drinking at a really smoky bar with a really smoky friend, then I've been unable to stop myself.) and I still miss them and I think I always will, but fuck it, fuck it, fuck it. It was a one way relationship and I can't afford them anymore, on any level.

I don't find jonmc's comments out of line here. He's making the point (ok, repeatedly, but there are folks with fingers in ears) that people don't change unless they want to change. People with addictions are not stupid or in denial. We choose to indulge them anyway, or choose not to. Depending. But not depending on anyone's maxims, bon mots or screeds.

Dear cigarettes,

I love love love you. I love the packs you come in. I love lighters. I love how cool I look smoking you. I love fraternizing with the other smokers on smoke breaks. I love the way you open my eyes in the morning. I love how you complement a cup of coffee. I love the crackle when the flame touches the paper. I love the ritual. I love inhaling that first lungful from a pack with the seal freshly broken. I love the way you keep my head from exploding when I get stressed.

signed
jonmc

Smoking related illnesses are theoretical?

It's theoretical in the sense that smoking is not a guarantee that you'll get these diseases. My grandmother smoked like a chimney. According to my Dad (a pack-a-day man himself) on the day she died, her lungs were compltetely clear).

rainbaby: thank you. During a brief sojourn through AA*, I often heard them say that you can't guilt or propogandize or threaten a drunk (or any addict) into quitting anything. People quit when they decide they want to quit.

*I left when I realized I wasn't an alcoholic, I just like drinking.

I loved them too and would have said the same. Once you're ready to quit, the accumulated suppressed anger becomes much bigger than all that love. And it can be helpful to even fan the flames of that anger by doing exercises like this letter-writing, in order to help muster the tremendous energy it takes to let the addiction go.

It was a one way relationship

I really like this 'breakup' way of looking at quitting, and I think I might give it a try.

Jon is is on a time-out. If you want more about his opinions on smoking or quitting, just email him.

Mygothlaundry, and other quitters, I'm cheering you, and I want to hear what you have to say, because I need to quit, and I'm weak and stupid.

I was just sitting here thinking about how much I wanted a cigarette (yeah, almost 7 weeks after quitting) and how, if I still smoked, I would go outside and I would just LOVE that cigarette and it would LOVE me back and perhaps we would twirl around together in a dreamy minuet, just me and my murderous lover. Fuck it.

This is off-topic, but damn, MGL, between this and your blog (which I read daily now), you're my favorite writer on the internet these days.

This is me cheering for the quitters.

*cheer cheer*

Why am I not surprised that jonmc's on a timeout with regards to this topic? ^_^

Anyway, I'm on my fourth month of having quit smoking (with a minor 3-stick-and-one-cigar relapse in December) and I can tell you that certain things have gotten better:

I have a better sense of smell.
I no longer have this icky chronic cough.
I have a little more money in my pocket.

Certain things have gotten worse:

I have huge issues with hanging out with people who do smoke.
I still have this habitual urge to want to light up every time I see someone on the street with a lit cigarette.
I'm starting to look at half-smoked fags in ashtrays and on the street with an interested eye.

Things that have helped me:

Having mostly non-smoking friends who are just a text-message away and who can help cheer me on when I feel like slipping.
Having a non-smoking boyfriend who only tolerated my habit before because (as jon said) he couldn't force me to quit, and even now, he says that it's up to me to quit and he's not about to influence me either way.
Throwing away all of my lighters.

Things that hurt me:

Drinking in the company of someone who smokes.
Moments of deep stress.
Las Vegas. (Seriously, I'm thinking of going for my upcoming birthday weekend and I'm terrified of playing poker in a casino like I want to because I'll be tempted to order a pack of cigarettes off of a cocktail waitress and chain smoke while I gamble.)

I'm very proud to be a member of the MeCha Non-Smoking Bunnies, and am always available to encourage others to keep up with their quitting ways. In fact, I'm offering to email my cell number to anyone who wants it, so if they ever get the urge to smoke and want help to resist it, I'll text ya back.

My Quitting: I told myself all year that this was the last year I was ever going to smoke and that I would quit in 2006. Then December rolled around and I hadn't done it yet - well. I had just started making excuses in my head, like, 2007! 2007 will be my last year of smoking! when fortunately, I got totally sick and didn't smoke for three days anyway and then I just. . . didn't start up again. This was easier because not only did the illness commence with a truly, truly vicious hangover but also with a cringe inducing memory of a drunken soliloquy on the joys of cigarettes that I delivered at that party.

It's been horrible. Really, I mean it's been awful and I've pretty much hated every moment of it and it doesn't really get much better and I still have desperate waves of cravings and the whole nine yards. But that in itself is incentive because I Do. Not. Want. To. Go. Through. This. Again. Which is what I keep telling myself on Sundays, after I've given up and smoked on Friday night because I am weak.

Also, dodgygeezer, when he quit, said you shouldn't change your whole life and quit drinking or anything because if you did that then when you went back to your normal life you would also go back to smoking and that struck me as incredibly wise. I am following dodgy's example, or trying to. I try, I stumble, I fall - and then the next morning I don't smoke. I just don't smoke, all day. I lie to myself all the time and say, well, self, okay, this is it, forget this stupid quitting smoking, I swear to you that we're going to go get a pack of cigs RIGHT NOW and smoke those puppies up - in FIVE MINUTES and then five minutes never happens. It's pathetic to have to lie to yourself and even more pathetic when it works but, you know, it works.

sorry for the lengthy post y'all but alas, this is a topic that runs through my mind like a mantra all day every day these days.

It's a life choice. Quitting being the better of the two.
(Kudos to your GF, Mike. We should all be as strong with anything we choose to do. I really mean that).

The harmful effects of smoking will be debated until there are no more stogies to smoke ever.
Alcohol damages your liver slowly at times but surely. Let's also not forget about the whole drinking and driving issue where it concerns...yes..DEATH now more than ever.Yet we celebrate the beginning of a new year with champagne. We toast our favorite sports team with beer and so on and so on and so on.

Having a discussion about smoking where different views are being expressed should be welcomed on all levels! I think should NOT be a reason for anybody who is pro or con on the issue to be eliminated from the forum just because he/she has repeated his/her stance more than once.

It's crazy. It really is.

Can we argue here without being threatened with a "time out"?
Guess not.

So with this, I'm officially outta here for good.
It's not emotional, it's real.

Still luv ya bunnies! See ya when I see ya.
It's been great.

(and I mean this wether JohnMc is "freed" or not).

Taz. You may erase me now.

Peace, y'all!

I love cigarettes. I love smoking. I hate the idea of quitting. I will for many reasons some good, some really good and some lame.

Smoking is like a friend. It comforts me. It entertains me.

Really the only reason I will quit and the only reason I know I should is because someday it might really suck to learn smoking was the reason I was dying. I wish it wouldn't kill me and I wish I was invicible but I'm not. Like say, I have this great kid and I learn that I am dying from lung cancer and now I am going to miss out on all these things because of my chosen form of comfort. That will suck.

I hate that.

I'm not sure, of course, but I suspect the time out is not for jon's smoking opinions, but for his tendency to derail threads into focusing on him.

I, too, want to congratulate all of you who are now in the quitting process. I'm pretty passionate about it, having gone through it, and with every ounce of strength I had. Mgl, you are doing just great and I promise, swear, that it will get a lot easier with time. In the meantime, I'm also totally available to email to if you have a momentary craving. Talking about the quitting process is kind of endlessly fascinating to me, because it's one of the single most instructive experiences a person can have. It's also something you will be unequivocally proud and grateful that you've done, and something you'll look back on for the rest of your life and feel an intense joy that you loved yourself and your loved ones enough to get through it.

Is that the first flame out on Mecha? In keeping with the usual mecha/mefi comparisons, it did seem kinder and gentler.

tendency to derail threads into focusing on him
I am guilty of doing that myself, like just yesterday with TPS's Family Reunion thread. And now this one...

For the record, I sort of 'knew I should' quit for a long time but didn't want to; then I started to feel embarrassed about it because I was hanging around a new peer and co-worker group in which I admired everyone and no one smoked; and finally, I started waking up in the morning with lungs that hurt. That was scary enough to give me the kick start I needed.

It's difficult to support taz's decision without talking about jonmc, which I won't do if he's unable to defend himself. I don't think this was in any way about keeping jon from expressing himself, but perhaps a thread titled "empathy for quitters" isn't a good place to go on about not quitting?

I've never smoked cigarettes (although it's been very tempting), but I did have to give up a common college vice when I joined the work force. I wasn't necessarily physically addicted, but I was definitely habituated, to the point that I had to change my lifestyle for it to really stick. I pretty much completely stopped hanging out with some of my friends, who couldn't seem to accept the fact that I had decided to quit for valid reasons (and who kept trying to entice me to start up again, "Once won't hurt you, come on!" like it wasn't a big deal for me).

My decision to quit isn't a judgement against people who still do it; they're different than me, the pros and cons weigh out a little different for everybody.

I can definitely sympathize, muddgirl. Quitting goldfish-swallowing and Volkswagen-coed-stuffing was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.

Box, I was talking about Volkswagen-swallowing and coed-goldfish-stuffing, but it's a common mistake to make.

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Food for thought.

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Glad cigarette smoke makes me sick so I never tried it myself. I can't even stay away from caffeine. =P

Come Feb. 10, I'll be off cigarettes a year, this time. I quit once before, for 7 years, shortly after my first son was born, because he was asthmatic. Just the smoke residue on my clothes was enough to start him wheezing, and you don't know guilt until you've made your son struggle for breath. I'd have probably stayed quit for good if his mother and I hadn't divorced, but who knows? I'd like to think I wasn't so stupid as to have risked his health, but once the kids and their mother were gone from my house, there didn't seem to be a lot of point to maintaining virtue.

I quit, for various periods, several other times, once for about 2 years. No reason, except people in my life at various times really objected to it. I started as an "outdoor only" smoker, way back when I was 12 or 13, so it didn't seem weird in the last few years, when I was doing all my smoking outdoors again.

I quit this time, again, because of other people in my life. Watching my father die of large cell carcinoma (a kind of aggressive lung cancer) in the spring of 2005 was a prime impetus, and it made me permanent caretaker of a man whose medications compromise his immune system, as a side effect of the meds. He needs any kind of bronchitis or an excuse for a common cold, like Custer needed more Indians.

So, I put down the ducky, again, because second hand smoke could, and has, hurt people around me, that I love. And that is a cold scientific fact that jonmc's argument entirely ignores.

Some people quit drinking when they kill people in motor vehicle accidents and go to prison for a mandatory 15 years. People quit smoking when the people around them can drop dead because of it, too.

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My dad's been smoking since he was in his 20's I think. He's 60 plus now and coughs all the time. He's got heavy breathing and I bet if you were to take an X ray of his lungs--they'd look like two corrugated pieces of shit.

He's down to four or five now (sometimes six) so yay dad, but he'd give anything to have not started the habit in the first place.

Congrats to all of you quitters too.

I am firmly in the anti-smoking camp--cigarettes are what killed my dad's mother and he's had asthma since he was eight.

Keep it up quitters, I am very proud of you!

Given that I like several of the bunnies who do smoke, I won't say here what I think should be done to smokers when they die.

I don't know if I want to share this with you people, particularly in light of what's going on in this thread. It makes me want never to log in again, but I've clearly overridden that chunk of cowardice. So I'll just start and see where it stops.

I've been doing drugs for years, ever since I returned from Japan in '99. And yeah, I did plenty before then, but not with the same purpose.

When I was in Tokyo, I met a nice girl and before I knew it, she was having my baby, and I was getting married. It happened pretty quickly, and if it weren't for our daughter, it probably wouldn't have happened at all. I still don't know how much I loved my wife.

I was scared and stupid, and under a lot of pressure, and suffering from a total inability to communicate with my parents or friends back in the states, and the speed of it all and the barely masked disapproval of her parents had me deciding, before I knew it, to tell my folks later, when I would eventually introduce them to their daughter-in-law and grandkid as a fait accompli.

That was never to be. We were married without ceremony in her city, both of us trembling, her visibly pregnant, and everyone in the room more or less scowling. Except us; she was smitten with me since we met, and I had spent a year or so trying to love her as much as I should have. I just didn't feel it from my toes to my teeth the way you're supposed to (the way I had before, anyway), and I even tried to pull away a few times. I was a disgrace, but I knew I could learn to love my wife through having a family.

Our daughter was born about three weeks after we were wed, and she was everything to us.

She brought us together, closer, and I could feel the real love I had for my daughter subsuming the strained love that I had felt for my wife. She was ours for eight months, until one morning my wife found her dead in her crib. She was beautiful, just like her mom. I still can't think about her for very long; it's really hard.

My wife killed herself two weeks later. I kept going to work (I hadn't told anyone there about my personal life, such a strain and a hassle, and I felt I brought it all on myself, and anyway, I had a responsibility to my students. I couldn't waste the end of their school year with what would have been a major distraction from their upcoming high school entrance exams). I don't know how I feel about her suicide. In some ways I think she was braver than me; she held too much responsibility for our loss an her own head, though. She wasn't temporarily insane. It would be insane not to think about suicide under the circumstances. (On the other hand, when my self-pitying drug-addict cousin, whom I loved very dearly, killed himself two summers ago, I felt the opposite: how could that sonovabitch cheapen himself so much as to weasel his way out of life and leave his family to pick up the pieces? Nothing's black and white).

Just after all this, I found out my mother had cancer, and the school year ended, and my wife's parents told me I was unwelcome and must never return. They blamed me, and I blamed myself, but with my mother's illness I had an out for my emotions. I wrapped myself in worry and fear for her sake, left Japan and returned home, where I spent a couple years helping my parents get through her radiation and medication and eventual recovery. Sometimes things work out.

I never told my parents about any of this, nor have I told any of my friends from home, out of fear, out of respect, out of an urge to not create burdens on them that might taint every moment we share from then on. I don't know. It just seems to me to be the right way to act. I search for smiles, I try to make others happy, because it makes me so damn happy to watch them.

And, on my return to the US, I returned to drugs. Pot, mostly, every day, as often as possible, though not so much while I was sitting with my dad helping him while away the worry while my mom was torturing away the cancer or resting from the pain. In a lot of ways that was the best therapy I could have had.

Just before the new year, I was out with jonmc and Pips, eating at a Mexican joint in Manhattan, and I brought it up to them. They're the first people I ever told about all this. Dirty little secret. Except what a secret: I had a baby daughter who died, my wife committed suicide, and circumstances of my own creation, mostly, have led me to keep a lid on it all for seven years. Sometimes I've lied to people or distorted stories to fill in gaps and hide the truth. That sucks. So what?

So this past New Year's Eve, fueled by a crazy drug experience (a nutso batch of E that was great fun at first but eventually had me up 'til 3 pm, walking the streets and hating on myself) and nagging thoughts of what I'd just let surface to jonmc and Pips, I felt everything shatter, and I quit doing drugs immediately. I don't think I'll do them ever again. They worked for a long time to hold back thoughts I didn't want to have. Now I want to have them again.

I've spent much of my time since then questioning my will. I can't explain this very well. Every morning, I wake up and think about living. I don't think about killing myself, but I do think about somehow finding the will to live, which I feel like I've lost. Somehow, smoking a cigarette reminds me that I'm alive, the way pinching yourself or dousing yourself in icewater (or self-cutting -- that's pretty apt, I think) might do for some. I can feel that smoking's hurting me, and I know I'm killing myself slowly, but maybe it's just a substitute for killing myself fast.

People have plenty of reasons for the things they do, and don't do. One day, I'll quit cigarettes, because I know they're bad for me. I hope it's soon, but for now they're the lesser evil, and they bring some good to my life.

I've been trying to pull it together and write about this for a while, and I'm disappointed to have to do it on a site without jonmc and Pips, who are two people I love and trust like few others. Yeah, jonmc talks too much sometimes, but he listens, too, and that's something I think too many people are willing to gloss over, for whatever reason they may have.

I don't know if I want to keep posting here, and I don't really want much in the way of responses here (thus I'm hanging this up on the end of a day-old thread). I don't know what I want at all, but I do know it's not all black and white, no matter how much I wish it was.

I wish it was easier sometimes. But then I also want to make sure it's as hard as it needs to be. That's maybe why I smoke.

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You're in my thoughts, Hugh.

Empathy is one of my favorite virtues, and I think that the world, Metachat and I would all benefit from a little more of it.

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I'm sorry for what you're going through, Hugh.

Hugh, that is an amazing story which you have been brave to tell us. My condolences, and I wish you all the best as you go forward. Now that you can begin to integrate your thoughts and life together again, you will probably become someone with a great deal to give the world.

I'm so sorry, hugh. I think what you have described is probably about the hardest thing any human being can go through and that you have survived with any sanity or heart intact is a huge accomplishment. I wish you the best.

Hugh--I wish you had an e-mail listed so I could message you in private. I can't imagine how you feel. I can only say I'm sorry and that I wish I could give you a big squeezey, lingering hug.

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Wow Hugh. I'm so sorry.
I know you don't really know me, but feel free to e-mail me, for whatever reason or whatever good it may do.

Cheers and don't be too much of a stranger...

Hugh, I am deeply familiar with carrying around stuff you can't find a way to articulate. It's crushing and you have been carrying a lot. Also, I believe the loss of a child is so much harder than any other. You loose not just a past, but a vast multitude of futures. Please drop me an e-mail if it will help you in any way.

Hugh, I hope you get a call from your badass nephew sometime soon.

Hugh, you are amazing.

Hugh, I am with you. I hope you come back to the site, or if not, hope you pop onto instant messenger so I can say hi.