This jar of cigarette butts is now two years and seven (almost eight) months old. It contains my three week goodbye to my treasured old habit. Treasured then, and sometimes even today.
I cut back day by day for two and a half to three weeks ( now I can't remember how long it was) toward the end of September 2013 before I had my last cigarette on October 2 of that year. In this cut back phase, as I was testing the waters (did I want to quit or was I kidding myself) I'd dump my butts in this olive jar. Seeing this bank of butts grow day by day, helped me stay focused on the reality of my smoking--lots of butts a day and their ashes added up quickly--nothing pretty to look at at all.
I also kept another bank: in that one I kept adding money for all the butts I was not smoking as I was cutting back. That added up to about 25 cents for each butt...so the money quickly grew. Quarters turned to green backs, one dollar turned to five and so on.
Neither of these tactics convinced me to stop smoking, --yet having substitute "to dos' " went a long way in distracting my mind from cherished habit...
As I look back to that pre-quitting time, I see now that I was even less confident about quitting, than I thought at the time. I was fearful that I would get too wiggy and so give up trying--who likes feeling nuts?
But it was tools like the olive jar butt stack that gave me a fighting chance.
This jar will go back up onto the top shelf of my laundry cupboard, where, as before, I will not see it very often. I want to remember the struggle from time to time, but I do not want to stare too hard at the butts in the jar. I'm still an addict--if I stare too long at the butts I might get hungry for one.
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