Loneliness Or Feeling Cooped Up

Akin to postpartum nicotine depression, loneliness is natural anytime we leave behind a lifelong companion (who in this case was extremely unhealthy and killing us ever so slowly). It’s time to recognize a new healing and healthy companion – YOU! We need to climb out of the deep Chewer’s rut that we resided in for years. For far too long we’ve severely limited many of the activities that as Chewers we were not willing to engage in either because they might have interfered with our need to obtain our mandatory nicotine fix (every 30 minutes or so) or because our body did not have the capacity to enjoy them. Start your new life now! Don’t wait to gradually learn that you’ve been missing so much. Alter your outlook, climb from the ditch and open your eyes. One of the interesting parts of recovery is in learning to live life as an ex-Chewer. If we want to stay in our rut and keep waiting for something to happen, instead of climbing out and learning to enjoy all that we’ve been missing, we’ll continue to feel lonely. If we don’t replace our loneliness with the glory of our wonderful new, emerging, and healthy life, we may eventually talk ourselves into returning to the world we know, a world of fix and fix after fix after fix – until death do we part.

© John R. Polito 2000, 2013
The original article has been modified to be more relevant for dippers and chewers.