I Understand Smoking Now

[Guest guest]

In my college and grad school days, I was something of a smoker. Never very

serious about it. For the most part, I'd call it more of a social thing. I.e.,

if I was at a party and others were smoking, I'd bum a cigarette from them.

Rarely would I buy my own pack. But every once in a while when I was really

ticked off about something, I'd find myself angrily puffing on a couple to calm

down. But since I was never that hooked, they were expensive, and I didn't

think it was worth cancer, I stopped a long time ago and have rarely given them

a second thought.

Fast forward to today. I'm like seriously wound up. Just feeling really

stressed and tired. Too much going on at work and no possibility for a break

for the next couple of weeks. Add to it that I've been traveling for work for

the last couple of weeks, so in addition to the stress of travel and the project

I'm working on, I'm working in my hotel room at night to try to keep up with

everything that's going on in the office. This last weekend I was supposed to

have a three day weekend, but spent two of the three days working on a report

virtually all day.

As I've mentioned before, my boss is a task master and it feels like every

message I get from her these days is about something else that I've done wrong.

For the most part, these are valid issues, but part of the problem is that we

are just so swamped with work that little stuff falls through the cracks because

it's just not possible to keep up (she's like some sort of alien in her ability

to catch all this stuff. I don't think she sleeps!). I'm not the only one who

reports to her that experiences this. Still, I hate it when I don't get things

right. It eats at me, makes me feel incompetent, and when added to everything

else, I just feel fried. Like I don't want to be in my own skin. Like I can't

focus on what I'm doing.

So, oddly, the last two days, I've had the *most* overwhelming urge to have a

cigarette. Like if there had been a drugstore nearby I seriously would have

headed in and bought a pack and huffed away. This isn't something I've even

thought about for probably 20 years. But for the last two days, I can't get it

out of my head. I've been doing pretty well with eating the last two weeks

since my first visit with the therapist, so I think I'm realizing that this is

normally a time when I would have found something to eat, but since I'm not

doing that now, it has become an urge to smoke. It reminds me of when Geneen

was on Oprah and Oprah said that people always used to ask her if she was

stressed and she always said no because she never felt stress, but she realized

through Geneen's book that she never felt stress because she'd have something to

eat at the first sign of discomfort. I guess I've been doing that, too, without

even realizing it.

All in all, I think it's a good realization, but I will say, I HATE this

feeling. I did try to take a 10 minute break and take a little walk outside to

get some air, which helped a bit, but I'm still wired. Made me also think of

one of the things Geneen said at her workshop, which is that if you are willing

to feel discomfort, you will be successful with IE. If you're not, you won't.

(that's a paraphrase) This is the discomfort that I don't want to feel and I'm

not digging it, but I know I have to work through this to get to the other side.

Grrr....

Josie