You judged it by one week

Count your previous attempts and ask what each one taught you. Not what happened, what you concluded. Somewhere in you is a settled belief that free life is grey, tense and joyless, that you are less fun without it, that food is boring and evenings are long. You did not invent that belief. You collected it honestly, from your own experience, which is why it has held up so well. The problem is where the experience came from. Every one of those verdicts was written inside the first week.

Look at what that week actually is. It is the one stretch where your body is still recalibrating to life without nicotine, where sleep is broken, where the mood sits flattest and the wanting is loudest. It is also the only sample of free living you had ever taken. You judged an entire life by its worst possible week, then filed the result away as a settled fact about yourself. Nobody would accept that evidence about anything else. You would not judge a city by the night your flight got cancelled there.

It is a bad trailer, cut from the two minutes of the film where everything goes wrong, and you walked out of the cinema on the strength of it. The actual film is the part nobody in that week has ever seen. The morning you wake and nothing is owed. The meal that tastes like something. The flight you did not have to solve. The evening that simply runs on to the end. None of that fits in a trailer. It only shows up in ordinary weeks, and ordinary weeks are what you were never around for.

Which means something specific about where you are standing right now. You are past the sample. Whatever week you are in, the days ahead are the first honest look at free life you have ever been given, and the old verdict is out of date evidence about a person who no longer exists. Do not re-litigate it. Just watch for a few weeks without arguing. God does His best work in the ordinary stretch that nobody films. Let the film run. You have genuinely never seen how this one goes.