I quit smoking 6 years ago. It’s tough honestly, it helps that there are no smokers in my social group. When I’m out with smokers I usually bum a cig, particularly when drinking.

I was hospitalised for a couple months, I couldn’t physically take myself out for a smoke and the nurses weren’t going to wheel my bed down, so they gave me patches. I figured I’d quit smoking when I got out to continue the work already done.

I still want to smoke, I like that it gives me something to do and haven’t really found a replacement for it, doom scrolling maybe. It also gave me something easy to manage, if that makes sense, low stakes and easy problem to solve every day. I smoked for 10 years and my habit was just less than a pack a day, sometimes more not often less. Hopefully, it gets easier in 4 years when I’ve been a non-smoker for as long as I was a smoker.

Transitioning to vaping was easier, I was at or near the vanguard of that movement, when we were building our own coils and shoving batteries into tupawares and blowing ourselves up. Whenever I craved a real cig, I’d buy 10, smoke them and go back to vaping. I’d buy a pack every week, then every month, then every 2 months… I hoped quitting would be the same, it was not.

One of my friends just woke up a non-smoker the same time that I quit, and our experiences are night and day. I get cravings all the time, this guy: “why would I get cravings? I don’t smoke.” His brain just decided it was done smoking one day.