160 days. 5 months...1 week...2 days. Did I ever smoked...? Was all of that just a dream...? When I stop and think about when I smoked it feels like some distant memory... as if maybe it happened or maybe it was a dream... I dont know. That's what it feels like now. The other day I was watching someone smoke very closely. I was intrigued. Not because I wanted one but because I was seriously interested in what was happening before me. I started thinking to myself and imagining smoking... do I remember how to flick the ash off the end of a cigarette? I don't think Id even be able to do it without looking like an awkward teenager experimenting with cigarettes for the first time. And are they really breathing that stuff in? Do I remember how to hold a cigarette correctly? I just stared at this person in front of me--it was all so strange to me...I honestly couldn't fit in my head that that used to be me. None of any of that made sense to me anymore.

A couple weeks ago someone said to me that they couldn't believe I had quit smoking and stuck with it this long. They asked how long it had been and when I said 5 months their jaw litterally dropped open. They knew I had quit and when but never really added it up. They said it was astonishing since I was always hellbent on saying I was never going to quit smoking. They asked if I think about it all the time. I was honest.... I do think about it sometimes. Never about starting again... smoking thoughts randomly pop up and then randomly disappear. They said they couldn't believe I could get this far into something that is so hard.

At that point all I could say was "hard?"

...call me crazy but out of all the things ive done so far in life or things Ive had to go through.... in the grand scheme of the beggining all the way up to now I don't think this even ranks on my list of "hard" things. Maybe on a list of initially uncomfortable things I've had to do.... but hard? I think we confuse the meaning of hard with uncomfortable.

This was the most liberating, amazing thing I've ever done for myself. It was also easy. Uncomfortable but easy. the only thing that I would define as "hard" in this situation would be continuing to smoke indefinitely. Now that would be hard and sounds downright exhausting.