Eight Days. Or: still absolutely no idea what I am talking about.

Eight days without cigarettes!!! EIGHT DAYS. Clearly this has reduced me to Trumpian capitals and exclamation marks. Which is yugely sad. 

There is no nicotine in my body. (My poor, poor body; what I have been doing to it.) The usual four thousand chemicals – can that really be true? – are no longer being pumped through my veins.

I’m going to try not to become a stop smoking bore. I think there will always be a part of me that loves it even though I know it uses its power for evil rather than for good. There will always be a part of me that loves the reckless smoker, the one who doesn’t give a fuck, that person I always thought I wanted to be. Hell, roll the dice, take the chance, shoot in the dark. I didn’t want to be sensible and think about the future and be the grown-up. I have a faintly rueful sense that I am saying goodbye to some odd fantasy of myself as a swaggery rule-breaker.

The funny thing is that this morning I went down to my red mare and obeyed all the rules. I’m training for a charity challenge to do a one-day-event this year and we’ve got to work hard and get our no messing hats on. Today, instead of being a bit cavalier about it as I can sometimes be, I went through the correct steps in the correct order. I did not throw caution to the winds, but kept caution safely in my pocket. We’ll do this, and then the next thing, and then the other thing I said; everything in its proper place. And it was tremendously proper and I bloody well was the grown-up and it didn’t feel dull at all. It was so lovely it made me laugh.

The brain is still not working well and my concentration is still buggered and I am still incredibly tired. Years and years of shit are being excavated I suppose and my poor neuronal pathways are having to be reset or something. I go to bed at seven-thirty like an old lady. The dogs think this is hysterical and sprawl all over the blankets with their paws in the air as if they are doing a special dance or practising circus skills.

I would like to sharpen up. I miss being sharp. But I’m starting to think I don’t miss the thing itself. I think I feared missing the idea of the thing, the fantasies that went along with the thing, the luring associations that clung to the thing. I think perhaps that is the hardest part to put down.