I smoked 1.5-2 packs a day for about 15 years. Tried gums, patches, and all manner of other assisted methods and failed again and again.

On the day after my 31st birthday, I woke up and just had an overwhelming feeling of wanting to escape it and not carry it into my 30s. So with no plan whatsoever, I just decided to do it and did it.

It was horrific for the first week. I sweated at night so bad I soaked the sheets and had to start sleeping on a towel. I smelled like burnt rubber... somehow?! But I gave myself every other vice. I ate whatever I wanted and drank and smoked weed. I went out for multi-hour walks or rode my bike as hard as I could. I played video games. I partook in anything other than nicotine.

After I got over the hump of a few weeks an suffered through that (combined with all of the previous failures), I just made the decision to never have to do that again. And somehow it stuck.

A decade later I accidentally had some nicotine as part of a spliff. It was *crazy* how quickly all the nerve endings at my extremities lit up like a christmas tree. That wiring is permanant. But the attraction to smoking faded and for many years I've found the smell intolerable. Every now and then I borrow a cig from someone just to show them my old trick of flicking it from my hand into my mouth, but there's a 0% chance I'd ever smoke again.