“I smoke all the time, one after the other” – Greta Garbo

Determined to divorce myself from the nasty on again, off again relationship I have with smoking (the classic love hate relationship), I am now Day 4 sans nicotine. Previous attempts (the best being an 8 month stint) were a painful affair with nicotine refusing to bow out gracefully and accept it was over between the two of us. It would call up, 5, 10, 20 times a day, begging for me to take him back. Come on, what do you say we get the old team back together? We used to be so good you and I, and now you’ve just gone and shut me out of your life. It was as mad as hell I’d abandoned it, and it would do anything to get me back. It was clear I was going to need a good divorce lawyer.

I armed myself with bottles of water, chewing gum, hypnosis cds and enough lavender oil to sedate a class room of children with ADD. I even had a cheer squad who would wave their pom poms at me and shout, “gimme a G”, every time I felt like giving in, but all I wanted to do was to tell them to fuck off and take their pom poms and shove them up their ass (not my finest hour). However, no matter how bad it got, persevere did I! There were mood swings, stomping feet and tantrums as I fought the craving for nicotine that was surging through my veins, but it was time for nicotine to go. I had seen the truth of who he was – a master manipulator who was only in the relationship for himself. The up side of surviving the withdrawals was that my skin was radiating dewiness like a supermodel in a million dollar cosmetics magazine contract (vanity was always the main motivator). “Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline?” …. maybe it was no longer smoking a packet of Peter Stuyvesants a day.

So why did I go back? Why did I let him into my life again? Well, it all started with just one (yes that old nutshell). Looking back at the relationship with rose coloured glasses (like every woman in post relationship denial), I wondered if he really was that bad for me, and maybe we could just start seeing each other again on the weekends? Pretty soon, he had barged his way back into my life, taking over me one cigarette at a time until before I knew it, I was completely hooked again. I tried to hide it from my friends (you see, they had nursed me through the bitter break up and I felt ashamed I had taken him back), but the smell of him lingered in all my clothes. When they eventually found out, they couldn’t quite look me in the eye, because they had said all those nasty things about him.

Like all uninvited house guests, he started to wear out his welcome. I was constantly picking up after him, as he was leaving ash trays lying all around the house. Like all useless ex boyfriends, it was time to slam down the phone on him once and for all. This time it was over, really over. So here I am again, detoxing nicotine from my system. Surprisingly, I haven’t had a desire to throw the stapler at any one’s head, nor abuse the person in front of me because they are walking too slowly.

Perhaps leaving things behind that are bad for us, is much easier when we truly realise how much better off we are without them.