DAY 3

Welcome to DAY 3 of my experience of trying to quit smoking. Unfortunately, I LOST the battle today. Yes, it's very tragic. I feel pretty bad about it so we will get into it later. This blog is going to be a bit long, so thank you wholeheartedly for your patience.

So DAY 3. Well I took a work from home today because of the cold. I don't know about the cold, but the cough has been present for the last 2 weeks. It was mostly dry at first, but then there was phlegm for the last few days - indicating a cold. But I haven't been coughing as much or as strongly since yesterday which I think is probably because I don't smoke 5 cigarettes daily anymore - hurrah?! I'm no doctor but sounds like I'm reaping one of the benefits already, at least that's what I'd like to believe. Anyone familiar with the Placebo effect wouldn't underestimate the power of belief. Anyway, so I started the day at around 10 am with a nice breakfast of tea and cheela (pls google if you don't know, idk either) with ketchup; and then started working on my office tasks. 

My work is fairly interesting, just that this particular project is huge - as codebase migrations should be - and is dragging on and on for the last 2 and a half months in the midst of rushed unreasonable deadlines and other poor management decisions (the bread and butter of start-ups), so not so much. Popped a gum after breakfast to deal with them fleeting cravings, which worked great till lunch; had lunch at about 3:30 pm which I know is unhealthy, but there was this little bug that I knew I had to fix in one sitting, else it would take too much time. After lunch, popped a gum again, did some more office work and then I was bored of the excruciating cycle of testing code. But I couldn't leave my mind empty as it is the devil's workshop, so I immediately started a VC with my GF and we watched a standup comedy show by Abhishek Upmanyu together. For the well-versed, it was the one about health anxiety and therapists, very nice content. 

Sadly, after this, my better half had work to do and I started thinking about what I could do with my time. And well, it has been a goal for quite some time to get fit (right now my BMI is a scary 28, whew), so I started researching about healthier food recipes (also convenient enough) and deciding on a good diet plan. A little digression regarding fitness here; my goodness, there is SO MUCH overwhelming evidence about fitness being like the most important step towards fixing your life, and to be really honest, it does make sense. I think the biggest positive about being fit is that mentally, you know you look good. You don't have to hide your love handles in baggy t-shirts or suck your stomach in whenever you are in public. Being conscious about your body all the time drains a lot of your energy, and you're much better off if it's entirely not there at all. Back to the point, I decided that my breakfast would be cornflakes and milk, with honey instead of sugar, everyday, with a side of 1 fruit. For lunch, I was looking at boiled chicken recipes and I did find a few; whether or not I should have that consistently everyday hasn't been researched yet, so I didn't lock it in. I fell into one or two rabbit holes of fat loss technicalities like calorie deficits and the statistical results of some studies about the effect of sleep over visceral and non-visceral belly fat, very interesting stuff; all the while chewing on the gum. 

Ngl as I started getting bored with stuff, the cravings started increasing, and gum wasn't doing much to help it. So I started randomly explaining to my GF, properties of Fibonacci numbers and how there was a closed form expression for the n'th Fibonacci number, and it wasn't necessary to always define it as a recursive relation on the previous terms - which I then proceeded to code, to prove that it worked. For those interested, here's a link (scroll down to the end and then scroll up just above golden ratio for the closed form expression). This continued till around 10 pm after which she went to sleep, and I had dinner. I had been successful in suppressing my cravings the whole day, but at this point it was like a constant thing at the back of my head.

And then came the fatal call from SP, also mentioned in DAY 1. Same query, he wanted to know whether I would smoke up with him, to which I replied I wouldn't, but I could share a drink; or even shots. He came over, nicely rolled a joint while I poured myself some white rum with ice. I could hold my cravings down till he smoked half the joint, but no more. Alas, I asked him to pass the joint to me, which he readily did justifying to me that it's not such a huge issue. It's just 1 joint after 3 days of abstinence, and that, in a way, I could see this as a small reward for my hard work till now. Either way, I took a total of 6 - 7 puffs of that joint (equivalently a quarter); and that was enough to get me moderately high. SP is an amazing person to be with when high (also otherwise, but especially under the influence of any intoxicant), and we had a great conversation regarding lots of various things; more about SP later. 

It's 12:50 am now, SP has left and it has been 20 mins since. After like 10 minutes of committing the atrocity, guilt hit me like a train. Right now, I feel pretty effing bad about what I have done, how 3 days of effort went straight down the drain just because I couldn't control my urge for 1 damn joint. This scares me even more about what's to come. If I couldn't hold myself back from a single joint where SP himself said I shouldn't do it, what chance would I stand after my flatmate and his friends came back, and started smoking up in the hall for hours. I know for a fact that there would be constant taunts regarding this decision, and they would incessantly ask me to stop this bullshit and just enjoy this time of our lives. But then, have I really lost? I may have lost the battle as I mentioned at the start, but I am not going to lose the war. I think this has kind of increased my determination to not touch smoke for some time to come. The guilt, in some way, is helping me realise how bad it will make me feel if I fall for what's coming; and that I should really not succumb to the peer pressure. 

Signing off for today with Napoleon's quote - Victory is always possible for the person who refuses to stop fighting; and I refuse to stop fighting. Cheers!