Learn From Your Failures
In a perfect world, when you quit you quit. Unfortunately this isn’t the Garden of Eden and for most of us our first quit isn’t our last. The trick is to learn from those failed quits.
I myself have had two prior lengthy quits. Amazingly I have no memory of the early days of those quits, and by all recollection I don’t remember them being difficult in the least. Mind boggling to me on day 56 of my current quit. However I remember everything about the collapse of those quits, and those memories are what I gain knowledge from.
The first failure taught me that I am an addict. One is never enough. I can’t stop at one can. I can’t even stop at one dip. When it comes to dip I have no self control. My second failure taught me that I need to quit for me. Seems simple enough, but without knowing it most people quit for others. For myself I needed to find a reason to absolutely HATE this monster that I genuinely loved so much. In my case I finally realized that dip was controlling my life. It was dictating the timeline for my entire day, from waking up to falling asleep, I planned every action around my next lip full. I HAD to learn this lesson to make this quit work.
You also need to take all of those small lessons away from each failure. After a while you become well aware of exactly what your addiction was and what the triggers are. For me I was always well aware that for me the oral fixation was a large piece of the addiction. My first failure started with me chewing seeds, then moving to Snus and quickly jumping to the real deal. So with this quit I put an end to even using Hooch after the first few days. It’s just too close to taking a step in the wrong direction for me. I keep some close by, just for that extra layer of protection, but for me it’s a last resort.
So where was I going with this? I don’t know. I hate to say that it’s ok to fail as long as you learn from it, because there is never an excuse. You need to fear failure, every day and every minute. Like I said earlier, I don’t remember my previous quits being difficult, but this has been a beast at times. Last night I had a dip dream (nightmare) that really has thrown me today. I’m on the edge. Looking towards the Hootch. But I have another layer of protection before inching closer to that edge. This blog. That’s the real reason I’m writing this. I guess that’s just another lesson I’ve learned along my string of failed quits; you can never have too many layers of protection between you and failure.
jjprice
Day 56