Well, this is probably at the heart of my mixed feelings about giving up: it's not just about smoking. It's about making some fundamental changes in my life and I am perhaps not ready for all of them.
Or is this just the nicotine talking, making the matter more complicated than it needs to be.
When it comes right down to it, the bottom line is: regardless of how much advice, help, support, information from the internet, nicotine replacement products, etc, if you don't really want to stop, if your mind's not really made up, then you just never will. Period. Or at least I never could. I probably went through about a dozen half-hearted attempts. 'I really must give up, I know I should'. But I was never anywhere near doing it. Some attempts lasted a day, others lasted 2 weeks, but I always went back. It was a bit like standing with your back up against a broken door, trying to keep at bay an almighty storm from raging inside your home. A futile taste. Then, one day, eventually, I suddenly knew I was there mentally, and although I still obsessed about being quit for about a year, I always knew deep down that the party was over. The beauty of that was, I never had to pretend to hate cigarettes to pack up, and still don't hate them. It just felt like the end of a relationship, like an overwhelming realization that the whole thing had just run its course. Not all relationships end acrimoniously do they?
How you get to that point, I have absolutely no idea. Why the hell should you get there anyway? Same old story, it's different for everybody. It never mattered how many damaged lungs I saw, or how many horrible deaths I heard about, how many Government health warnings I watched, it never made a blind bit of difference to me succeeding to pack up smoking. Putting it like this just sounds plain idiocy really. Was it the nicotine? Was it habit? Or was it just good old-fashioned self-denial? Search me. That's just the way it was. And nothing changed until it changed in me.