Don’t Shake the Table

I’ve been a medical professional and educator for a long time – corpsman (combat medic) in the Navy serving with the Marine Corps, teacher and dean of students, an emergency room nurse, and a coach. I started taking care of people medically when I was 15 – giving my mother injections of morphine for the pain she had related to her terminal cancer brought on by years of smoking. She died a month after I turned 16…on a Friday night while I was at my high school football game.

So, that means that I have spent more than half of my entire life taking care of others in some form or fashion. Trying to take care of others on here IS what it is about. Sure, I know, I contradict my own words – focus on your own quit first. Well, I am on day 700. I HAVE spent hundreds of days focusing on my quit, learning what parts of my plan work and what needs revision. I know that I am at a point where me being on here HELPING other to quit/stay quit benefits my quit and makes my quit that much stronger.

Watching knuckleheads fight the methods that have worked, that try and make it as if they are the only ones to have ever experienced what they are going through or try to pass themselves off as being abused make it painfully difficult to keep coming in here and reaching out to those that want the help.

Why am I posting this? So that you understand how everything you say and do on here is done in the public forum. That means everything you do and say has the potential of either building your fellow quitters up or tearing them down. Think of it like a big game of Jenga. I’m trying to carefully push and pull specific blocks in order to maintain the integrity of this system and some people want to shake the whole table… Each of the quitters on the site is represented by all those individual Jenga blocks…it can be a precarious system…be a block to make the stack rock solid….don’t shake the table.

See, rage and funk can still hit you at 700 days…but the trick is learning how to deal with it in a way that isn’t reaching for the can or simply walking away from posting roll, talking to your brothers or staying active on the site.

CoachDoc is now stepping off the soapbox and will be trying very hard NOT to step back on until at least the June class……

NOTE: This piece written by KillTheCan.org forum member CoachDoc