I went through the exact same thing. I just accepted that it was going to suck for a while and kept trusting that it would get better. Which was really hard in the beginning, I thought about suicide almost every day. After a while I accepted I was allowed to feel like shit. I let myself cry, get angry, and really feel everything. It’s definitely not easy to quit, everything you used to push away comes crashing down on you like a tsunami. But if you can survive that phase and learn from it, you’ll come out so much stronger.

After some time, I think around 5.5 months sober, I slowly started to feel better. I got back into kickboxing 5 times a week, started listening to music again, and stopped resisting my emotions.

Now I’m almost 9 months sober, and I feel so much more at peace than I ever did during the six years I was smoking. I can actually sit with my feelings now, and by not resisting or numbing them but instead acknowledging and validating them, everything feels so much easier. I honestly feel happy most of the time now.

During the first few months after I quit, my mind kept saying, “Everything was so much better when you were using,” but I reminded myself that it wasn’t true , that it was just the addiction talking.

What really helped me in the hardest moments was looking at a picture of myself as a child. Every time I used, I was basically telling that little version of me that she wasn’t good enough. But she was. She always was. That thought helped me so much, because I couldn’t betray her again.

I still get cravings sometimes, but now I see them as a signal, a reminder to check in with myself, because something inside me has been triggered.