Setback

First things first: I bought a pack of cigs and a pack of cigars last night and smoked myself silly. There was no sudden relief (that I thought would come) or no hooey cloud of "wow this is amazing." It just light...smoke...oh, ok, i'm right back here now with no real immediate joy to the smoking anymore.

I wanted to wake up and say...Boom! Day 1: Recharge or some bullshit like that, but that's not going to happen today. I feel like I've been whipped through a war. I feel like someone has taken me out and flogged me and left me to rot. I don't feel a shred of guilt about smoking. I just feel exhausted from a week without smoking. I assume it's because the wounds that the smoking is "crutching" haven't healed enough for me to walk on alone. This is why this blog post exists. I may be smoking again, but I still intend to figure out why I got so depressed when I quit and why, all of a sudden, the depression is slowly starting to fade now that I've had a few cigs.

To do that, I'll probably make a series of posts (some here and some that will probably never see the light of day) and work through from where things started for me. Just because I'm feeling better (almost immediately actually) doesn't mean that that depression isn't sitting there under the surface. I know it's still there, even if I am feeling it less and less now that I am smoking. So I supposed I'm going to have to go in there after it. The thought, frankly, kinda scares me.

It scares me because in order for it to disappear while smoking, it almost means that has to be some subconscious shit. It's like I dealt with the conscious part of it in the past couple of years, but there's apparently some stuff underneath that I haven't dealt with and I don't want to go digging in there to see what's causing it.

So, as soon as I can get some sort of break at work again, I'm going to find a therapist/counsellor of some sort and see what I can come up with. In the meantime, I'll be writing through it, I'll be looking for ways to find ridiculous amounts of contentment in my current life. And I have a new desire to become more of a presence in the lives of my kids. I've realized lately I've just sort of been going through the motions...getting them on my days, but not really being "available" to them while I have them.

So, I have lots of stuff to work through. And lots of cigs to smoke.

Big thanks to all of your comments, though. I appreciate the support and the comments helped me immensely.