I want to talk to you about vices as they are something that I have recently been grappling with, and I wanted to share my experiences from dealing with them.

For me the two major vices I have when it comes to substances would have to be soft drinks and the other would have to be nicotine. Both have different histories as to how I become involved with them:

Soft drinks were always something I very much enjoyed, starting in my youth. Maybe from the age of eight or so, it became an allowable thing for my parents to give me soft drinks. As the years went by I very much retained this love of soft drinks. But it was after high school when the habit got much worse. Seeing as I was at that point considered an adult, I could at any moment freely go out and buy bottles of the stuff. This increase in independence gave me the capacity to do what I wanted even if that wasn’t good for me. That is however, very much a common trait of that time in most people’s lives.

Luckily, I eventually wised up and realised that with new found independence also comes new responsibilities. I can’t honestly describe how much of a love I have for those sugary carbonated bottles, it’s something that has grown and matured over years. But as I’ve got older, I’ve accepted that I have a responsibility to look after myself (as in not developing Type II Diabetes in this case). So, I’d say since 2020 I’ve really tried to make an effort to cut them out completely. It’s interesting because I might be able to resist for a couple of months; but then the teasing allure gets to me and I buy one, that then starts a period of a couple weeks where I drink them again.

The great thing is that, even though I do have relapses at times. The stretches of time that I can go without have been increasing each time, while the relapse periods have gotten shorter. I’ve still got a long way to go, but each day that I don’t have one, I take as a small victory in my fight. I even have this thing where I fill up a bunch of plastic bottles with water then leave them in my freezer overnight. Then the next day I use them as an ice block to constantly have iced cold water throughout the day as opposed to soft drinks.

Nicotine, that’s the other major vice I have. I first started consuming nicotine when I finished high school, I had just started smoking weed and the group of friends I was with did a thing called ‘spinning’. What that essentially means is that you combine weed and tobacco together to increase in theory how much you have to smoke and improve how easy it is to light the weed. Because weed by itself can be difficult to burn.

So, for maybe 3 years after leaving high school I was smoking weed thinking that I was doing just that, smoking weed, but in reality I was also developing a penchant for nicotine due to the spinning. Some way down the line I got the great idea to stop smoking weed, so I did, but then I picked up smoking cigarettes as a way to cope with the withdrawals. But it wasn’t withdrawals from weed, it was from the nicotine; which I was then satisfying by smoking cigarettes. Whoops.

And let me tell you about the blend of tobacco I smoked. It’s a thing called Port Royal: Rum and Wine. I’m not sure if it’s only available in Australia but let me tell you it is amazing, so smooth with a tasteful thickness of flavour that really leaves you satisfied, until you need another… hahaha. Imagine the feeling of an old friend coming to visit, that’s what it feels like, if you didn’t think smoking was fun, you would after a Port Royal.

Now that I’m done gushing about that, my stint smoking cigarettes lasted about a year and a half, maybe two. Then I once again accepted that it was time to give it up, 2020 was the year where I gave it a real go. To my surprise, and I think due to how busy I was working on the COVID-19 response, I managed to go months without one. Another reason why I found it easier to give it up was that I never actually learned how to roll cigarettes. Port Royal only comes in a pouch, which meant I had to get a friend to do it for me. So, as long I didn’t ask him to roll there was no need to buy tobacco, because I didn’t know how to do it myself. Unfortunately, a new threat emerged on this front in the past year, vapes.

Vapes have been a way for me to get a nicotine hit without needing to have a friend roll a cigarette for me. They are readily available in my country even though they are supposedly banned, and with the range of different flavours available, it was hard not to get sucked in. I’m in the process now of purging that habit, it’s a similar situation to soft drinks, where I will go time without it, then relapse and at some point, quit again. It’s difficult but I know it is worth it in the long run. I always try to remind myself each day is victory if I can go without these vices.

One day I will fully overcome them, it’s just a matter of time.

Look I know that today might have seemed like I was talking all about me, but I wanted to give a brief run down of some of the bad habits I grapple with. Just wanted you to see that I’m not perfect by any means, but I’m trying to do things better. And most importantly, getting the idea that any day where you avoid doing your bad habits is worth treating as a victory (That doesn’t mean that you celebrate by doing some other kind of bad habit, but instead you praise yourself and your improving restraint and willpower).

Thanks like always to my Hedites, you’re the best.