Had a cigarette right now. Been thinking about how the last pack had lasted me more than a year. Which averaged like 2 cigarettes a month. One of my friends said that’s okay since you gotta feel French once in a while. This pack however lasted me around two months. Which averages to roughly 2 cigarettes a week. Not happy with this but I want to plan to not buy another pack unless I’m spending it with friends. Having a pack to myself definitely made it much easier for my frequency to increase.
Wondering what feels so good about smoking. I had to resist myself from lighting another one up when one ended. I managed to, and I feel good about it. But there’s a big doer energy in me right after smoking. I feel good, I feel optimistic, I feel hopeful. I want to feel this way from other things. I want to remember that this temporary relief isn’t natural. That it’s just that – temporary relief, temporary goodness.
Was researching a little bit last night and it does look like the nicotine stimulates the release of dopamine in the brain, so it’d make sense why I’ve been craving it more often these days. Don’t know enough neurochemistry to jam on this but I’m definitely curious about what’s special about this chemical.
I’d been feeling a lot of shame around smoking, however. I managed to separate it out into a) a worry about it becoming an addiction, b) cultural and societal shame around it. So for starters, it’s also nice to be able to smoke without feeling the shame associated with it. I feel like as long as I was feeling the shame, I was also wanting to smoke more. It’s natural to want things you can’t have, right? Once you remove the barriers to getting something, you can plainly see how much you want it. Honestly, it feels easier to let go of it once I ditch that emotion of “can’t have”.
I’m not sure how I feel about publishing something related to smoking on this blog, but since I know I’m kind of following a full-disclosure policy with stuff I write, I know if I don’t publish this, I’d be doing that out of (you guessed it) shame. So I suppose it’s worth completing this and hitting publish.
Since I gotta add around 200 words more – I was thinking about how the anxious brain is never out of thoughts. If my anxiety is cured, what will I write about? Will I still have thoughts to share? There’s definitely a part of me that has been anxious and coping with anxiety for so long that a lot of my identity has been shaped by it (even though I’ve tried hard for it to not be the case). There’s a lot of “good” sides to anxiety, being able to have very sharp focus when stressed, having a ton of foresight, “remembering” a lot? And of course I’m curious (or worried even?) about whether those “good” things will go away if I’m not feeling regularly anxious anymore. Thankfully, someone has written a nice, well-researched post about this as well. And thankfully, I don’t write or do creative work for a living, so I probably don’t have to worry about this as much as those people might have had to. I like the conclusion there, I can probably treat it as an experiment. If I never try, I’ll never know. Maybe everything is an experiment anyway. Like publishing this post.
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