Smoking Medium.com

How Medium.com helped me quit smoking.


Blue monday has passed once again, and I’m glad that this year I didn’t make any resolutions, but now, one month into 2014 I’m still holding on to one resolution that started four months before new years eve.

It’s been about 5 months since my last cigarette, days went by without one single thought and crave, but certainly days have gone by where I’d gone mad without. I was told that the first thirds would be the hardest, the third day, the third week and the third month. I felt all three of them gone by. Thankfully I discovered Medium just a bit earlier, I was immediately drawn in by the style and design. After reading a few articles I started to feel right at home, so many people with similar believes and opinions. Some even gave me insight into how and why I did certain things. I learned, discovered and in a certain way met new people. I didn’t feel alone anymore, suddenly I felt understood and somewhere I started understanding more about myself.

While waking up with my morning coffee, while waiting for the bus or train or during any random moment where I’d have a 5-10 minute break from my life, I used to smoke. Now instead, I took my phone and looked for an interesting article accompanied with a 5-10minute indication and started reading those. Waiting wasn’t as dreadful anymore, I’d have something else to do. Even when feeling stressed, I’d open up Medium.com and start reading anything that caught my eye.

I used to think that a cigarette always put the cherry on top with the awesome moments, just like Emily Hopkins describes in her story :

In the long march of cigarettes I smoked over the next 28 years, those first few months of cigarettes were among the best. Other highlights: smoking in the woods at our family’s place in the country, where my step siblings and siblings and I were dragged to every weekend in the summers. Smoking in my 1974 Fiat spider as it growled adorably down a backcountry road in the early fall. Smoking with my friends Shannon and Lizzie, in a bar in Baltimore, as we drank very cold dirty martinis and told each other hilarious anecdotes. Smoking in the army, in the quiet barracks, on my bunk by a dark, cold window while I read Stephen King novels about the end of the world. Smoking by a campfire at night, the fire crackling and the hoot owls hooting.
But over the years, I must have smoked a million cigarettes for no reason whatsoever and with no pleasure, with the mindlessness of a nail biter.

I also had my highlights;

  • Sitting with a few beers on top of a hill reading Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.
  • Drowning myself in Sons of Anarchy and Californication
  • Late nights filled with playing MMO’s or coding stuff.
  • Being out for drinks with friends.
  • Camping, especially that moment where you finish putting up the tent.
  • At night while sitting in my window staring at the stars and listening to Greg Laswell and similar songs.
  • Endless nights of drinking rum and smoking cigarettes with my former best friend, and now soon to be wife.
  • Any other moment filled with melancholy.

I even seem to have certain moments highlighted where I didn’t smoke yet and I could picture myself with one, just to complete the whole moment. And that’s where my head took a wrong turn, it doesn’t make the moment itself better. The past few months I’ve been granted a few new highlights, I went out for long walks into the nearby forests with my girlfriend and I could sniff up all the pine tree, grassy scents tickling my nostrils. When going to a spa resort I could let all the ethereal scented oils crawl up my nostrils. While enjoying my favourite meals I suddenly tasted more, coffee tasted better. Red wine tasted better. Eventually my skin gained some colour and I started regular exercise, which in turn became a way to relieve stress in a healthy manner.

It’s still a war without an end but one I’m getting good at fighting.