I am tired. Dog tired. And every time I feel that tired sinking feeling I reach for something that's not there anymore, and I get very irritable. Angry even.
All the stuff I've read says that at two weeks (where I am now), the physical addiction/cravings for nicotine are gone. The dependence on nicotine as a stimulant is over, the literature says.
Bullshit I say.
When I want one, I want it as badly today as I did day one. The number of times per day that wanting hits has eased up, but the wanting hits just as hard, with the same gusto as always.
Today we went outside and cleaned my van from pedal to bumper. I used to smoke in my car on the rare occasion when I was alone in it. This was the first cleaning since my de-nicotining self-improvement project. I keep my car as near an actual pig pen as I can on an average day. And a smoker's pig pen is pretty bad. It took two hours of sweat just to get the inside passable.
I took 8 packs of "pegs" (what george and I call the half-cigarette oddities that result from my habit of breaking an American Spirit non-filter in half, then smoking one half at a time in my filter) from my glove compartment and hurled them into the garage. I didn't care where they landed as long as they flew far away from my lips, which REALLY wanted a reward for wading through the mess that was my mini-van.
I hate that van. I hated it even more today because I had to clean it without the dissociative second-hand activity of smoking.
We took Jenna to chuck-e-cheese this evening. My former highlight of Chuck-e-Cheese used to be stepping outside for a smoke. This time I couldn't. WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE THAT CAN DO CHUCK-E-CHEESE WITHOUT SMOKING?! Screaming rides, shrieking kids, bad pizza, and epileptic-friendly blinking lights.
"I don't want to be a freak like you people who can stand that place without a cigarette," I said mostly to myself as I stood at the ticket counter with Jenna waiting for her to decide whether to get a notepad and a ruler, a goodie bag, or a tube of body glitter with her 256 tickets.
But I managed.
And it made me so tired. I get so tired. I teeter between exhaustion and insane rage. The all-or-nothingness that was once reserved for my smoking activities has seeped into my non-smoking self.
I know there must joy in regular people's daily activities. I know somewhere there is a "fun time" waiting for me minus the detachment that comes from smoking, that a boredom free life without constant multi-tasking exists somewhere. And I'm sure the experts are correct, that what I'm experiencing now is more the havoc of the emotional addiction, not the physical.
But it feels pretty physical to me when I want to put my fist through a wall.
