You had to learn to like it

Go back to the actual first cigarette and be honest about your body's review of it. It coughed. Your eyes watered, your head went strange, your stomach turned over, and some part of you understood clearly that this was not a good thing happening. That was not inexperience. That was an opinion, delivered fast and without ambiguity by the one system you have that does not care what anybody thinks of you. Everyone you know who is in this has the same story. Nobody's first one went well. That detail gets left out of the golden memories.

Now remember what you did with that opinion. You overruled it, deliberately, more than once. You went back and did it again, and again, through the coughing, until your body gave up objecting and learned to want it. Nobody has to practise liking bread, or music, or sunlight on their face. There is no training period for anything that is actually good for you. You had to work at this, and the work had a purpose that had nothing to do with the thing itself. You were fifteen, or seventeen, and you wanted to be someone in a particular room.

That matters today for one reason. A taste that had to be installed can be uninstalled. It is not part of your constitution and it is not written into who you are. It was built on purpose by repetition, against your body's own clear advice, and repetition is the only thing still holding it upright. Take the repetition away and the structure has nothing underneath it at all. The wanting you feel now is the last of that training running down. You are not losing something native to you. You are handing back something borrowed.

And there is a quieter thing to notice in all of this. Your body was right the first time. It knew before you had any information, before any doctor or campaign or argument reached you, and it said so plainly in the only language it has. It has kept saying so ever since, in the cough and the mornings and the stairs, and this is the first stretch in years where you have been on its side. God put that reflex in you as a kindness, not an inconvenience. Trust the first opinion. It waited a long time to be heard.