Nicotine Contradictions

My name is Andrew, I am currently at day 100 and I am an addict. I am 26 years old and I was dipping about a can every two days of grizzly straight for roughly the past 5 years, and less extensively back to when I was 17.

Let the rambling commence …

I started later than most and earlier than some here, but I think we all had a similar starting experience, and whether you are dipping 2 cans a day or a can a week, the tricks that nicotine plays are the same. If you are questioning the power of quit and the power of this site and its methods, how many other situations can you think of where a system is able to turn everything you have known as law for the past 5, 10, 15, 40 years, upside down?

A few of Nicotine’s tricks:
1) Dipping makes you feel awesome. You put it in your first dip and you feel great for maybe a minute or two, then you are turning green, you feel sick, you’re petrified of swallowing and you end up sleeping with a garbage can next to your bed. Yea, it’s only normal to try something again that makes you feel THAT shitty.

2) Dipping is for bad asses. The dipping image to me was always a combination of my uncle, a bad ass Maine woodsman, and a hockey player, to others maybe it is a cowboy or the All-American man. We begin relating dip, or nicotine in general, to all things bad ass, and yet, you take the can away from any addict and they become a frantic, pissy, cying baby who misses their blanky. How tough can you really be if you can’t make it a day without getting some help? I go anywhere and do whatever the fuck I want now.

3) Dipping relaxes you. I would put in a dip and I could spend 8 hours writing a paper and not even be upset about it, my quote and excuse was always “dipping makes even the most stressful situation relaxing.” Interestingly enough nicotine causes high blood pressure, and I ain’t no doctor but pretty sure high blood pressure is an opposite reaction to being relaxed…sneaky nicotine devil.

4) Nobody knows that you are dipping. The infamous ninja dip, sneaking off to the bathroom at the bar, putting in a lip just big enough for a fix, but small enough where you think people can’t see it. Never making coffee at home because you need that gas station cup to spit back into. Man oh man aren’t we clever…except in most cases everyone knows what’s going on they just either A) are so god damn disgusted by you they can’t talk about it or B) love and care so much that they can’t bare upsetting you. You don’t think anyone knows and better yet you’re convinced you aren’t missing anything. I am probably not the first to notice this, but in the first few weeks of my quit I was bored off my ass. Why? Because I finally realized how much time I just spent spitting and sitting, not out there living life.

5) You aren’t an addict. This one is great, and to be perfectly honest it is STILL happening at day 100. I will admit, that I have to CONSTANTLY remind myself that there is no golden can at the end of this quit rainbow waiting to reward me for my hard work, mostly because there is no end to this quit. But, she still sneaks in and plants that “All you have to do is make it to X, and we can share a sweet embrace” almost daily, and it was the same even when I was dipping. In the beginning there were longer “breaks” maybe a week, then it went to a few days, and then all of a sudden she was tricking me into thinking I was controlling things if I could make it all of a half of day without a dip.

Over the past 100 days I have learned how to do many things that I never thought I could do without dipping: hunting, fishing, driving, paper writing, office work, golf, softball, watching a hockey game, playing pool, drinking beers, and the list goes on. I would never ever say that this has been easy, the first few days were absolute hell and I actually don’t remember any specifics beyond that. But, now at day 100 I am still kicking my ass every day for not doing this sooner. I want to thank the May 11 group for all the support, especially in the early goings. Of course, thank you to the vets, especially NOLAQ, Ready, TCOPE, Tarp, RedTrain, and others who are some of the most unselfish people I have ever known for their dedication to helping the new guys along the trail.

It sounds absolutely ridiculous. You post roll to a bunch of strangers and somehow that is better than your quitting attempts in the past? Well, it works. Stop putting it off, get your ass in here, start controlling your life, be the real bad ass and get some quit.

“License to kill gophers by the government of the United Nations. Man, free to kill gophers at will. To kill, you must know your enemy, and in this case my enemy is a varmint. And a varmint will never quit – ever. They’re like the Viet Cong – Varmint Cong. So you have to fall back on superior intelligence and superior firepower. And that’s all she wrote.”- Carl Spackler, Caddy Shack.

– Andrew (Maineguy1313)

NOTE: This piece written by KillTheCan.org forum member maineguy1313