When I Quit One Addiction, Another Grew Even Stronger
My rocky road to quitting alcohol and cigarettes.
I used to worry that I would flip back and forth between heavy drinking and heavy smoking for the rest of my life.
My addictions to alcohol and nicotine developed hand-in-hand. I started experimenting with both in high school, and became a daily drinker and smoker in college.
For the ten years that followed, drinking and smoking cigarettes were a normal part of my daily routine. I tried to quit both substances throughout my twenties, but without any notable success. I’d rarely last more than a day without either one.
It wasn’t until I was 29 that I finally started to make real progress. It might have been my rapidly approaching thirties that provided the wake up call I needed, or maybe it was just that I had failed to quit so many times that I had finally learned a thing or two.
Smoking was the first habit I kicked, followed just a few months later by drinking. Then, within my first year without booze, I was back to smoking again.
I can’t express the disappointment that I felt in myself for going back to smoking after nearly a year without it. I thought it made me a complete failure.
