DAY 1

Hi, Mr. Nothing here. Well, this is one of my first attempts at writing something in the online world. This is the ongoing experience of me trying to quit smoking (up) - hence the name of the blog.

For context, I am Indian 25M (been 12 days), and you can consider me to be an overpaid data scientist. I have been smoking cigs for about a year and a half now, and smoking up for well over 5 years. Started smoking up in the fourth semester of my Bachelor's degree, had to discontinue for a year in my Master's first year (not because I wanted to quit but Covid) and then continued till 2 years and a few months into my job, i.e. yesterday. Frequency of smoking - you might ask - easily 2 complete joints per day (considering 10 joints between 5 people) and 5 cigarettes a day after I started smoking them.

And now I have gone "cold turkey" - which means I am not going to touch either of these for at least the next few months, if not forever. As to why I decided to start writing about it? Well, because quitting is hard, and I figured I would get some sort of convoluted motivation if I wrote about it, lol. And maybe, someone else might benefit from it, who knows.

I will start with a little info on what happened on DAY 0. While going through hours of motivational crap about how to get your life back on track on YouTube (what they call doom scrolling), my brain went, "Hey bro, I thought you wanted to get off all your bullshit by the time you were 25". And well that was it, I decided I would leave all kinds of smoking the day after. I told my (smoker) flatmate that I was gonna leave smoking completely from the next day (he was very shocked at that) and asked me if it was some special day - sarcastically - to which I replied that it wasn't, and then took a puff of the joint in my hand and passed it on to him. I clocked about 10 joints by myself on DAY 0 and innumerable cigarettes as a parting celebration.

Onward to DAY 1. Since, it is year end and work load is not much, I took the day off from work (having a severe case of cough and cold). Coincidentally my flatmate and some of my common smoker friends went on a trip today (lucky) - they'll be back after a week. I sent all smoking stuff with them, so that I don't have to look at any of these and shifted all ashtrays and lighters to drawers of other rooms for the same reason. This was 10:30 in the morning. And then the test began. My willpower lasted for about 3 hours (ngl, I think that isn't so bad given how I spammed smoke every chance I got) after which the cravings started, and my brain started to go crazy. But I wasn't going to fall so easy. I started scouring the internet for alternative measures for cravings - should probably have done this on DAY 0 - and found that chewing gum helped to fill the hole that quitting smoke had created - resulting in an immediate order of 7 packets of chewing gum. Why 7, because that's the threshold for free delivery on Instamart (yes I know it's a marketing strategy). It arrived in 12 mins - meanwhile, I had my lunch - and I immediately popped 3 of them into my mouth which lasted for the next 6 hours (essentially, it works!) while working on some personal projects and office tasks.

After that I watched a movie, "The Gentlemen" (a very nice movie by Guy Ritchie, starring Matthew McConaughey) with a peg of warm water and JD Fire (for the cold), in the middle of which the cravings began again - as they were smoking in the movie. Popped another gum, after which came a very problematic phone call from a smoker friend (say SP) who wanted to bring a joint to my home and smoke up with me - yep, a golden friend, just not in those circumstances. Unfortunately, my increasing-by-the-moment cravings got the better of me; and I said yes, while also mentioning to him that I had decided to quit smoking and there was no guarantee that I would smoke up with him, but I could definitely share a drink.  But then, I was on video call with my GF, who heard this phone call - and looked slightly disappointed that I didn't say no outright, knowing that the only reason he wanted to come home was to smoke. But she was happy that I said no to smoking up with him. The child in me, though, was like, you can smoke 1 joint with him and not tell her, after-all it is impossible to just go and stop smoking up from a frequency of 5 joints a day; and a single one wouldn't do any harm. But by the grace of Mother Luck, SP called me again and told me that he wouldn't be able to come as his car headlights had been damaged. 

It is 11:20 pm now. I am immensely happy about the fact that I could complete DAY 1 without any mishaps (it was mighty close though, phew) and that I didn't disappoint myself. I would like to extend my gratefulness to my lovely GF, who supported me with constant words of encouragement; and my future readers, if any, for being non-judgemental - either towards my willpower or my english or the overall structure of what I have written; to reiterate; this is my first ever post on any online platform.