A funemployment bucket list item...

When I was working a zillion hours a week, I always seemed to have a list of things in my head that I would do “when I had more time.”  Five months after my layoff, I’m still working through them.  I think a lot of people would be terrified at a five month resume’ gap.  I am enjoying life so much right now that I am more terrified of returning to work and losing the sense of calm that’s been a consistent part of my unemployed life. 

Over the holidays my mother commented that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen me this happy and centered.  In contrast was my younger sister.  She’s a corporate bigwig, and in the week prior to Christmas had flown to San Francisco, Boston, and New York for presentations.  She’d worked until wee hours in her hotel room, got up at cracks of dawn for flights, and was so exhausted when she got home that she slept for two days straight.  On Christmas day she was so sick that she had to call a doctor to her house.  I saw her for about three hours total during my trip home due to her sleep/illness.

When is enough ever going to be enough with work?  I want to go back to work.  I want to do a good job.  I do not want work to become the main priority in my life that also makes me sick, stressed, sleep-deprived, and under-exercised.

Anyhoo, here’s another thing I’ve crossed off the “Ana’s Unemployment Bucket List.”

Sometime in August I decided that I wanted to eventually stop smoking, but with a few caveats:  I didn’t want it to be hard.  I didn’t want to feel stressed out by it.  I didn’t want to gain weight as a result of it, and I didn’t want it to wreak havoc on my digestive system, something that always seemed to happen at former quit attempts.

So over the next few months whenever the time felt right, I would meditate on the idea.  I told myself that I’d just wake up one day a BE a non-smoker.  I told myself that in the past the smoking had served a need for me, but that the need (whatever it was) had gone away, and now I was simply smoking out of habit.  I told myself that when I stopped smoking I would NOT feel awful physically like I had so many times in the past, but actually BETTER.  I repeated all of the caveats over and over, and then I waited for the universe to work its magic.  J 

Around this same time, I ran out of coffee.  When it happened, I noticed that I had a huge jar of tea sitting on my kitchen counter and told myself that given my limited income, I would finish the tea before buying more coffee.  The first day was kinda weird.  I was a huge coffee drinker, and I’d developed a ritual of getting up each morning and drinking two to four cups on my outside deck while I smoked and woke up.  I loved my coffee.  The tea had less caffeine, so it didn’t give me the same jolt in the morning.  After a few days, however, I decided I liked it more.  It was a smoother caffeine-high.  I noticed that I wasn’t as jumpy and that my stomach felt better, too.  My biggest surprise was having my morning headaches disappear.  I thought those headaches came from grogginess or red wine.  No, it turns out it was caffeine withdrawal!!!  As a result, when the jar was emptied, I went and bought more tea.  I haven’t had a cup of coffee or the desire for one since then.

A month or so ago, I was sitting outside on my deck in the morning, drinking my tea and smoking my cigarettes when I was struck with an idea.  Wouldn’t it be great if someone made a non-nicotine cigarette that could replace my regular cigarettes just like I’d done with the coffee and tea?  I’ve done both cold-turkey and the patch when trying to quit.  They both sucked for me.  My favorite thing about smoking is the smoking part and while the nicotine patch is a teensy bit easier than the cold turkey approach, when the patch runs out, it feels like you have to quit ALL over again even though you haven’t smoked in months. 

And then there’s the awfulness of the nicotine addiction.  You can go months without smoking and then have a REALLY-REALLY bad day.  A day so bad that you just have to have a cigarette.  You buy a pack, take a few puffs, decide it tastes awful, and put the cigarette out.  Then a few days later, you have a nicotine craving, and this time you smoke half of the cigarette.  No big deal, but within a month you’re back to a pack a day after that long awful quit you went through!  How awesome would it be if months down the road when one of those bad days came, you could pick up a cigarette and NOT get re-addicted to the nicotine?

I googled.  They exist.  There are actually a few different kinds and after a little research, I decided to go with a brand that used cured lettuce in place of tobacco…seriously.  When the carton came, I put it up and waited until I felt like it was time.  (Again, I mention waiting until the time felt right.  I’m really into that right now.  It seems like we as people want to place timelines on so many things in life: project deadlines, relationship progression, learning, etc to point where we are forcing things in an unnatural way and screwing with our own destinies.  Yeah, I’ve gone a little new-agey, but it seems to be working for me.)

The day eventually came when I tried the lettuce cigarettes.  I’d bought 14 packs and told myself that I wouldn’t buy real cigarettes until I smoked all of the lettuce ones, much like the tea.  At my normal rate, this would take two weeks.  The first three days were somewhat like the coffee situation – slightly annoying and weird, but not awful.  They tasted different and went out fairly easily.  My body could tell something was off, but whenever I felt a little nervy I could still go outside and smoke a ‘cigarette.’  The biggest thing I noticed was that I was super tired for the first few days (which now makes sense given that I was self-dosing myself with a stimulant every hour for the last seventeen years).  Thank goodness, I wasn’t working and took a LOT of naps during those days.  I tried to imagine what it would be like if I was at a job and felt groggy, spacey, and then irritable, but thankfully, I could just nap it off.  The first two days I smoked my regular pack a day.  The next few days, it was more like 5-7 cigarettes a day.  Then 3-4 followed by 1-2, and 0-1.  I didn’t consciously cut down each day.  I just found myself wanting them less and less.  This might have something to do with the fact that cigarettes smell awful and can require consumption in extreme elements (wind, cold, rain), neither of which is particularly appealing if you aren’t at the same time feeding an addiction and/or getting a high. Three weeks later, I still have nine packs left. 

My morning ritual has been replaced.  I realized that what I liked the most about being outside on the deck – was being OUTSIDE.  I love the feeling of the outdoors in the morning – fresh, crisp, hopeful.  Now I get up in the morning, make my tea and check my email while I drink it, though I rarely finish the first cup of tea.  Then Martha and I suit up and go for a walk.  We walk until we’re tired of being outside.  Sometimes that’s fifteen minutes and sometimes it’s two hours.  It hasn’t been stressful.  My stomach is just fine.  I don’t feel any hungrier.  I haven’t gained weight, and when I have a rough day or feel stressed, I have no qualms about smoking one of my lettuce smokes.

It’s pretty awesome, right?  That being said, I’m drinking a ton.  I decided that for the first few weeks of removing one vice, I would allow myself to go totally whole-hog on the other.  Might have to meditate on that next. ;-)