Sometime in the summer after my freshman year, I started vaping on a whim, and thus began a 6 year dependence on nicotine. Over time I alternated between vaping, cigarettes and nicotine pouches. Shortly after the new year, I bought a final pack of cigarettes, smoked 2 of them, and gave the rest away. I haven't had any nicotine since.

Just a few days ago, I 'celebrated' 3 months without nicotine. My awesome girlfriend treated us to dinner, but she deserves recognition for helping me on my quitting journey too.

I air quote 'celebrated' because it feels odd to celebrate quitting something I could have very well avoided ever starting. But it is a fitting word. The past 3 months without nicotine were way harder than I expected them to be, so I am so grateful, to myself, for making it to this point.

People throw around 3 general milestones when it comes to quitting nicotine. 3 days, 3 weeks and 3 months. These tend to be the most common time periods at which people give up their attempt at quitting. Whether those are legitimate steps, I treated them as such. Each step had its own challenges. The first 3 days is largely a physiological struggle, in which every braincell is yelling at you to find some nicotine. The next couple weeks are very hard as well. The physical symptoms of withdrawal have disapeared, but an intense desire for nicotine, as well as a general irritability lingers. The last time frame, up to 3 months, is when I felt like my brain was healing its relationship with reward and dopamine-seeking behaviour in general.

I guess I am not completely out of the woods, but there are now major stretches of the day where I don't think of nicotine once. I'll always miss certain things, like the buzz when you do it first thing in the day or after eating a nice meal, but I am overall fired up about not having a dependence on stimulants to feel joy.

That's the thing about joy. It's hard to chase. If joy is a general feeling of wellbeing, then hapiness is the immediate experience of that feeling. When chasing the former, we're often grabbing the latter, but that's no way to live. I've known this the whole time, but I'm just starting to live by it.