The parts of you that stayed

Here is a fear you have probably never said out loud, because it sounds ridiculous next to lungs and money. You were worried the quit would take your edge. That you would come out the other side careful and beige, the kind of person who talks about hydration, funny in a smaller way, easier to be around and less interesting to be. You were afraid the interesting part of you was borrowed and that giving back the loan would leave a polite stranger in your chair.

So take the inventory. Your humor is still there, and the timing it runs on is still yours. You still hold the same opinions too loudly at the wrong dinner. You still love the same music, still find the same things stupid, still laugh at the joke a half second before anyone else gets there. Not one of those was on loan. The taste, the nerve, the particular way you see a room: all of it stayed, because none of it was ever chemically supplied.

What actually left was the leash. The hourly appointment. The low hum of calculating how long until the next one, which ran underneath every conversation you have ever had and quietly took a percentage of your attention. The habit was never the source of your personality. It was a tax on it. People say they feel more like themselves after a year free, and they are not being poetic. There is simply more of you in the room when nothing is billing you every hour.

If anything did soften, look closer before you mourn it. The thing you called edge was sometimes just irritation between cigarettes, and losing that is not losing yourself. You were made a specific person, on purpose, and none of the specifics were manufactured. Whatever God put in you is still in you, unchanged, just no longer sharing a room with something that took a cut. Go use it on someone today. Say the funny thing. The person you were afraid of losing never left.