Responsibility, Choices and Change

from my journal...Responsibility,quit smoking now, Choices and ChangeMy quit got easier when I took responsibility for my years of smoking and my quit. I made the choice to smoke for years and I have no one to blame for any of the bad consequences that come out of it. It isn’t my dad’s fault for setting a bad example, it isn’t the tobacco companies fault for making it look so appealing, it isn’t my friends fault for a applying peer pressure. The truth of the matter I made a list a mile long and spent years defending the reasons of why smoking was never really my fault and the big truth of the matter was I had to accept that I made many bad choices about smoking and there is no one to blame but myself. I chose to smoke and I chose to smoke for years. Period. Zilch. Closed subject for me.Well, so I made some pretty rotten choices about smoking and I accept the blame, but what does that mean to me? I realized I had to change. I had to make better choices about my addiction. In order to make that happen I had to choose to reach for every resource I could possibly learn about or help I could get. I have been quit smoking over a year and there were times I barely got by a day by the skin of my teeth by making the choice not to smoke. Sometimes I had to choose to read and understand about my addiction and staying quit. Sometimes I had to choose to turn to my friends online, my daughter, my smoking husband,quit smoking, to my doctor and many, many times I turned to God for help to me get through the day. Some days I chose to just plain go to bed to escape giving into the addiction. And the toughest one of all was the days I just gave in and chose to accept what seemed to be the crave that would not go away. Yes, I was barely staying quit some days, but as weak as my quit may have been at the time I was making choices that allowed me to stay quit one more day.There is one thing that becomes clear to me about how I managed to stay quit this long, is that I have begun to change how and what I think about my feelings about my smoking. This change has been a long slow journey that seems to have no end or destination and sometimes that mysterious destination does give me some insecurity about my quit. When I am insecure I have to remind myself of the day I took responsibility for my quit and that means taking responsibility in understanding that quitting smoking is no exact science, but a personal process of change that I have to go through to achieve staying smoke-free.The day I chose to quit smoking meant I wanted change and had to change. To achieve this change I had to chose not to smoke no matter what.