I wasn’t planning on writing a HOF speech. The thought of making it 100 days quit from tobacco use to be a farfetched goal in my mind. I have had quite a few stoppages in my 12 years of being a slave to this substance, but none of them was ever for 100 days straight. As much as I wanted to quit, I associated dip with all of the positive things I held in my life. It was quite literally one of my main sources of comfort and happiness. Early on, I didn’t care who saw me with a dip in my mouth. Growing up in the south, it wasn’t a huge deal to most people, and being in my early 20’s, I didn’t care what other people thought about my addiction. As I graduated college and moved states to start my career, I started to be a little more secretive. When I started dating my now wife, I had to hide it because I knew how she felt about tobacco. My addiction was too strong for me to quit and the thought of quitting wasn’t fathomable.
If you read my intro on this site, I gave a rough timeline of life events that I thought would propel me into quitting for good. Most of my buddies who dipped also had families and we would talk about how we needed to quit and improve our health, but it was always just a quick thought and out the door it went just as quickly as it arose. The thing that made me finally say enough is enough happened in October of 2020. My wife found my stash of dip I was hoarding because of the pandemic and not wanting to go to the store constantly. She broke down when she told me, which caused me to break down too. We both cried and held each other, determined that she would help in any way possible. I was finally open and honest with her about my addiction and we came up with a plan. During that month, I started to ween myself off of tobacco slowly. When the time finally came to give it up and join KTC with the rest of my FreeBird brothers, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I definitely had the fog and rage moments early on, but knew it would pass. I am now sitting at 105 days of tobacco free and it feels great. I feel like I am slowly getting my life back and more importantly, regaining my freedom from this addiction.
We have a saying here “One Day at a Time (ODAAT) which I think is super important. We can’t control tomorrow or the next day or even next week. What we can control is making a promise to be quit today. Keeping that in mind, it does help with the anxiety of realizing that this a life style change for the long haul. I’ve read about so many people who were quit for years, and relapsed in a vulnerable moment, or think that they have made it this long, 1 dip won’t hurt. It pains me to see those people posting day 1 again, years later.
For anyone out there reading this and contemplating on quitting. I promise that it is worth it and we are all here to help each other during this journey. Special shoutout to
@ankape and
@Keith0617 for reaching out to me when I first joined KTC and offering their support early on and helping me through this journey.
