Three years ago today...

...I had my last cigarette.

Three full years without even a drag off a cigarette. Weird.

The kicker is that I still want to smoke. Fiercely, at times. But only when stress at work is bad. Then I'm all like, "Quitting isn't worth it! The craving never goes away!" But the problem is that I only want to be able to smoke at those times, when I'm pulling my hair out and don't know what else to do. I don't want all the other cigarettes, just the really good ones! But. Smoking at all means smoking all the time (at least I finally learned that lesson), and I simply can't go back to that.

At one year after quitting I celebrated getting through the previous year and gaining some understanding of the smoking/withdrawal cycle. Now, at three years, I'm sometimes back to celebrating not smoking in the last five minutes. In my saner moments, I still recognize that what feels hard now at times was hard all the time before I quit, and much, much harder than it is now. As much as I whine at times, I still don't smoke, and it truly is worth it.

Keep the quit.