365 Days

As of yesterday, I have been a non-smoker for 363 of the past 365 days. (There were two lapses last spring.) If you’re thinking about quitting smoking, do it – it’s worth it a thousand times over. It is fantastically hard, probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and that’s one of the reasons it feels so good to be rid of it. I smoked for 20 years, and every day of that time, even the few times I tried to quit, smoking seemed like something necessary, mentally and physically. After the past year I can still remember it being satisfying, but the craving is gone. My time as a smoker seems like a strange dream, where I remember the basic plot, but can’t quite grasp the sensation. It’s a tough journey, but if you don’t even try, well, a year from now you will have just spent another year smoking, killing yourself, and paying someone for the privilege.

And now I’ve gotten it out of my system. No, not the smoking – the ex-smoker proselytizing. I always regarded ex-smokers as even more irritating than non-smokers when it came to telling me how stupid I was to smoke, and now I understand why. They kicked it, and they were telling me I could too. They were the saved, and saved people are incredibly annoying. I don’t want to be that person, and I think proselytizing in general is usually ineffective – it works on those who want it to work. But it’s hard to not be that person when you see friends and family being stupid. So here it is – if I know you, and you smoke, you should quit. If I can, you can, and if you can, you should.