Hey rio how you getting on? hope things are going well? what have you been doing to keep busy? you keeping up your smart meetings? i hope all is going well and you're starting to get kinda used to not using. its a long process but to me even though when i see people blatantly waiting to score on the way home and sometimes part of my brain is like 'go score now!' the idea of using is mostly completely alien to me when things are going well.
I've not had a cig since thurday. people who say about cigs are harder to quit than heroin are full of shit imo. honestly i've been able to control my cig intake to cut down before quitting. i remember buying a teenth of dark less than a year in with plans of tapering it to get off. instead i massively increased my habit cos i'd got no control whatsoever. like i was completely incapable of stopping gear no matter how genuinely i wanted to. maybe i'm somehow less addicted to cigs than other people? somehow doubt it i've smoked for 20 years. every attempt i made to stop gear i failed by this length of time in. i think not cold turkeying it has made a huge difference to me getting this far in with stopping the cigs, so much easier!!!
hey chinup. Congrats on quitting smoking! That's a fucking huge achievement and you should be proud of yourself! As for why it was easier than you expected - maybe you have been flexing the "resisting gratification" muscle via quitting H so that turning your strengthened discipline to quitting smoking has made it easier because of the practice? Regardless of how or why, you have made a giant step towards being healthy. As you probably know, quitting smoking is the single action that can improve someone's health the most and add years to your life, so I hope you stay strong. I'm getting my vape back myself next week, so this tobacco I have will be my last pouch. Really looking forward to swapping back to vaping - once I get used to it it's just a far more pleasant experience and I'll have more endurance, get my sense of taste back and not smell like an ashtray all the time. Can't wait!
I'm doing really well. After getting through yesterday I finally beat my previous "record" of 42 days, so I know I haven't been sober for this long since like 2017, so it feels really good. I've been taking on as many shifts as I can because my poor financial situation has been *really* holding me back, and my Mum deserves to be paid back after all she's done for me and it helps to occupy me. I'm still doing my SMART meetings - I do 1 or 2 a week and have now added a local group that's run at the drug counselling service called "Foundations of Change" that has also been really helpful. Just connecting with other addicts in the same boat is an enormous boost for me, and when I make myself go it kind of signals to myself that I'm still serious about sobriety and helps me keep cravings at bay.
Some days, I honestly don't even think about using. Other days are a fucking battle to get through still, but I am getting used to the techniques I have developed for getting through days like those, and keeping an urge log and being disciplined about it and typing exactly what goes through my head during a craving has been enormously helpful. It's true what they say about thoughts losing a lot of their power when they're translated into the open - when they're rattling around my mind they can gather momentum and emotional weight, but the minute I start to transcribe it they immediately are seen objectively for the nonsense that they are. I'm so used to logging my cravings now that when I have one, just the fact that I know I'm going to have to type it out immediately changes the way I relate to the thought, giving me that immediate mental distance I need to objectively evaluate them and re-frame them so instead of them seeming like something I'm
doing - i.e. "I'm having a craving", it straight away changes to "A craving is happening to me", which also takes a lot of the power out of it.
I have been using the SMART technique of personifying the voice of craving in my mind to help me to deal with it, and it's helped me notice how starkly different it is from all of the other thoughts I have. There literally is a junkie in my mind who does nothing but distort situations, exaggerate my emotions, try and find ways to make me feel bad and who has just one solution to every single situation I find myself in and that's to use. Since realizing that it's become easier to turn it down. I've been trying to approach it with curiosity. Three days ago I was having a bad day and had to go to work, so rather than dreading the potential for cravings I just said to myself "Hmm, I wonder what the junkie in me is going to throw at me today to try and break me? I wonder what bullshit it's going to manufacture to tempt me into using drugs?" That thought really helped me to deal with it, and once I have contextualized it then the cravings, urges and mood swings become so much easier to let go of and they fade so much faster.
I'm learning about myself in this process. I can't say it's all easy, rainbows & butterflies but it's so worth it. I have come so far in a mere 6 weeks, and I remain excited to see where this journey is going to take me. One minor setback is that my plan to reduce my buprenorphine kind of went pear shaped - I decided to ask my doctor to change the script from 4mg to 5.6 mg. I only take 2mg a day, but I like having a stockpile and a friend buys the extra off me every so often, so I wanted to have it increased to 5.6 so that I could reduce my dose in increments of .4mg whilst still having the extras. Well, they decided instead to change the form of buprenorphine to something called Espranor, which apparently is just like subutex but it's a film tablet that dissolves in 15 seconds rather than the couple of minutes a normal tablet takes. My doctor thinks that because of this quicker absorption it's functionally like having a higher dose, which I really fucking hope it isn't - that will be the opposite of what I want to achieve! Serves me right for lying though, I guess. I'm trying the Espranor on Monday, if I feel like it's a dose increase I can always have it changed back.
I'm excited to be in "new territory", so to speak. I've had a roadmap of the first 42 days because I've been through it before and kept a journal to refer back to, but it's all uncharted now. I am going to try and update this thread a bit more often since I've neglected it a little recently, but I'd love to hear from you all. How is everyone?