Cognitive Quit Smoking

This is hard for me. I don’t like facing my emotions. I can take
having a look at my feelings and trying to describe them but the
emotions are too…raw, too close to the bone.
About 18 years ago, Mike and I became friends with a fellow rider, Ray.
We became good friends over the years, seeing each other occasionally,
even traveling out of town every once in a while to motorcycle events.
After divorcing, Ray seemed to go through a SO every year until he met
Patty. About 10 years ago they married. Patty and I quickly became
good friends; she had a great sense of humor, a heart of gold, and loved
Ray unconditionally (a definite prerequisite to be my friend since Ray
was near and dear to me first), and she loved to party and smoke. What
a coincidence! I loved to party and smoke too, my first choice of drugs
being drinking and smoking cigs. P&R eventually moved about 45 minutes
away but we still got together about once every month or so. Over the
years, I started to notice that Patty seemed to be a bit vague at times

when we would go over to their house or if they dropped by. Since most
of the time we were together it was a social event, it was a good time
to party so I didn’t think that much of it. I remember starting to
complain to Mike and other friends that Patty seemed to be getting into
the habit of constantly repeating herself. This was nerve racking and I
started to avoid being around her. One day when we went to their house,
there was a group of others there from Ray’s work. There was a newly
divorced co-worker there with her 14 year old son. Patty came into the
living room where I was talking to the kid and they starting talking
about wrestling and Patty said she’d always been a tomboy and loved to
wrestle. The next thing I knew she was on the floor wrestling with this
14-yr-old boy!!!! Well, I knew she’d had too much to drink but that was
just flat out weird (and the boy was of course very uncomfortable with
what was going on too).
Like I said, I started avoiding Patty, seeing her less and less. I had
decided that she just was too much work as a friend (nice of me,
huh?). We went through a spell where we did not see Ray and Patty for
a few months. Ray called one day to let us know that Patty had moved
out. He said the drinking had gotten so bad that he couldn’t take it
anymore and she didn’t want to be around him anymore anyway. It had
come out that there had been abuse from her father when she was a little
girl, something she had hinted at when we used to talk and she was
really plastered, but I never pursued it, thinking that she was just
rambling again.
We kept in touch with Ray for a while, running into him here and
there. I would ask about Patty and he would ask me to call her, he
said she’d be so happy to hear from me, that she’d always felt that I
was more his friend than hers. I never called, it was too much trouble,
the cost to me too high, I didn’t want to listen to the rambling. Then
we didn’t see Ray for a while, but in the past few months I’ve been
talking to him. He was laid off from the company I work for (like so
many of my friends) and he’s fixing motorcyles now trying to keep his
mortgage paid until he can find another job. I took my bike to him to
work on, got caught up on things like who he’s dating, etc. Never
thought to ask about Patty. Have talked to him several times now the
past few months. Last weekend Mike and I took Mike’s bike to Ray’s for
some work. While we were standing around , I casually asked if he’d
heard from Patty lately. Both Mike and Ray looked at me incredulously.
Ray quietly told me that he thought I knew that Patty (45yrs old) had
drunk herself to death last August.
Last August!!! I didn’t even know, Mike told me he thought he’d told
me. Of course, I was angry at him, it was his fault for me not
knowing. Although he should have mentioned it to me, I know the reason
I didn’t know. It’s because I had decided a few years ago that it just
wasn’t worth the effort to stay friends with Patty. That I would just
ignore the fact that she seemed needy now; after all, I didn’t have
time for that, working full-time (another sign I should have recognized,
she couldn’t seem to hold down a job), kid’s soccer team involvement.
secretary for the motorcycle club, etc. etc. Besides, I’d made a
commitment to cut down on MY drinking, something that was going well.
Being around her would just get in the way of my goal.
So, now I knew. I didn’t shed a tear. There were a few minutes of
embarrassment because I should have known. After all, this must have
affected Ray deeply; he’d never stopped loving her. So we went home and
I carried on this week like normal, only I noticed that during the week
I was closed up to myself. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, in person
or online. My sense of humor was non-existent. Then Indi caught me on
AOL yesterday during mid-day and I told her about my mood. I actually
had no clue why I was feeling this way!!! Talk about denial. Meet
Catherine Ann, de queen of De Nile. Then last night I talked to Steve
online. Of course, he got me chatting (he’s good at it too), still no
clue. Until this morning when I was typing that silly post about me
turning into Suzy Homemaker.
So here I am, facing up to this and the reason I’m writing this down is
for two reasons: as I’ve said before, writing helps me to define my
thoughts so I can look back at them more clearly. I am posting this
also because I want you to know that this has been a hard revelation for
me but not once this week did I think about smoking. Oh, yeah, I guess
old Warren decided that the best way to deal with this situation was to
mask those feelings where he used to hand me a smoke also. Denying and
smoking go hand in hand for me I guess. Or it used to. Here’s my ABC -
A. Event: A friend, to whom I used to be quite close, died.
B. Beliefs. I’m not feeling so good about myself right now. I feel
like I let a friend down when she needed a friend desperately. I also
feel like I let another friend down by not keeping in touch when he was
going through a tough separation. What’s a Warren to do?
1. I could go out to the garage and admit to DH that I am having a hard
time dealing with my emotions today and tell him I’m going to run to the
store for some smokes. I’ve dealt with this as much as I can handle
right now; it’s time to go look for some release. Smoking always was a
good release for me. But. It’s not a good choice now in my life. I am
not a smoker and I really don’t want to be one again.
2. I could sit down and write out how I feel now that I realize what’s
been going on with my mood this week. It would be therapuetic and might
help other ex-smokers to know that they can fight through these types of
revelations without the aid of nicotine.
3. I could get really drunk right now, in the early afternoon. How
appropriate! Patty would love it, get all boozed up and forget about
the whole mess. What a great pity-party I could have…there’s a tear
in my beer…
4. Ignore it all. Just forget about it. Hey, I could tie 1 and 3 into
this one easily.
C. Response. I think I’ll take door number 2, thank you.
And that’s what I did.
Don’t answer me back, telling me, oh, Cat, it’s ok, you shouldn’t feel
badly, you were just doing what most other people would do. No. That’s
not why I wrote this. If I got to go back and do it all over again,
would I change anything? I don’t know. I’d like to think that I would
have been there more for Patty, but I honestly can’t say.
Now, I think that I’m going to get dressed and get on my motorcyle and
go for a ride and let the wind dry my tears.
- Cat

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2004 at 3:06 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.