So, let’s talk about not smoking. Here are some things that are still going on even though I quit smoking:

-sucking at yoga
-feeling like crap in the mornings
-adult acne

It is a fact that not going to yoga for nine months makes one suck at yoga more than smoking! I’m not exaggerating when I say that I almost threw up in class this week. Yogis will tell me that it’s my body purging toxins but I know it’s a combo of being out of practice and coming off my very favorite stimulant of all time. I need to get used to revving at a lower RPM from now on. It is also a fact that I have four new zits this week. (Pimples? Blemishes? When it’s adult acne, are you supposed to use a more grown-up word for it?). Luckily, Salt Lake City continues to reveal her treasures to me. Did you know there’s a Sephora in Fashion Place Mall? (Any of you nodding your heads right now: You couldn’t have told me this three years ago?) The carbuncles are now healing thanks to Peter Thomas Roth complexion pads (Seriously good stuff. Face magic.) and no thanks to not smoking. My face is slightly puffier, though! So there’s that. And feeling like crap in the morning: probably allergies and living in the desert. We do own a humidifier but it makes us feel like old people to use it. Oh well for us.

But here’s the thing about not smoking–there is an immediate payoff and for me, right now, it’s a better payoff than core strength or perfect skin or moist cilia. I did something hard, really hard, something I’ve been dreading and hemming about for years. I made up my mind and (with some pharmaceutical help) I quit smoking. The experience is not unlike taking one’s exams. There’s a long, anxious and brutal windup, then there’s the exam itself (also with pharmaceutical help), which is, again, extraordinarily hard. Really hard. But maybe not as hard as quitting cigarettes.

So I guess what I’m saying, the after-school-special end to all this, is that quitting gave me confidence. I can succeed at hard things, even hard things I’ve failed at before. I feel a little more back to my old self, and a little less like the jumpy, meek, exam-bot I’ve become in recent weeks. Now if I can just keep from spending all my smoke money at Sephora…