Last night, I removed my nicotine patch before my shower and decided that I wanted to be done with the wretched addiction forever. I've not had any nicotine in the interim.
What I did take in was a sobering reminder of how powerful suggestion can be. Someone had disposed of a cigarette outside Olivia's school today and in the two seconds I turned away, she had picked it up, begun to play with it, and told me she was smoking.
I snatched it from her hands and scolded her, citing the danger in something in which she has seen her father intermittently indulge over the last four and a half years of her bran new life here on earth.
It will be the last cigarette I ever touch.
I'm physically nauseated at what happened today. I even frequented a fishing honey hole I was so excited about finding there a few days ago, and I couldn't enjoy it, even as I snapped a picture of the perch I had just brought up from the crystal clear waters.
I was still shaking.
It wasn't the fact that she had some conception of what it was all about, but the fact that while I was warning her of the dangers, it all seemed to fall on deaf ears. I had no way to validate the admonition in any way.
That is what scares me.
It served as one of the most violent wake-up calls I've ever experienced. All of the warnings that I've taken for granted over the years regarding drink, smoking, drug addiction, gambling and whatnot, have been deposited before me in a huge mess, scattered like mines. I'll need solitary reflection to scratch enough time together to go through them all.
In how many of them can I allow Olivia to see me indulging and still justify telling her not to do the same?
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