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*<P><div class="text-justify">There are habits that aren’t just routines—they’re crutches, masks, even prayers. Smoking was never just about nicotine. It was silence, rebellion, punishment. It was a way to mark time, to stain the hours with something visible, something that burned when I couldn't. Quitting wasn’t noble. It wasn’t linear. It was like tearing a part of myself out by the root and hoping what remained could still stand.</div></P>*

*<P><div class="text-justify">When I gave up cigarettes, something else began to die too—my appetite for the unnecessary. The clutter in drawers, the promises I never meant to keep, the people I let stay just because I feared the quiet they’d leave behind. Minimalism didn’t arrive like a clean decision; it emerged like a bruise—slow, tender, undeniable. I didn’t want more space. I needed less noise.</div></P>*


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*<P><div class="text-justify">There's a brutal poetry in abstaining. It doesn’t reward you. It confronts you. The mornings after quitting felt sterile. No ritual, no fire, no inhale to punctuate my isolation. But slowly I began to see: what I missed wasn’t the cigarette—it was the illusion of anchoring. That’s what minimalism echoed back to me. It asked: Who are you without your distractions? Without your small self-made altars to escape?</div></P>*

*<P><div class="text-justify">Letting go of things is easy when you're angry. Harder when you're grieving. Cigarettes were a form of self-possession. So were the books I didn’t read, the shirts I never wore, the opinions I held just to belong. I didn’t declutter to organize—I did it to mourn. To accept that almost everything I’d surrounded myself with had been a smokescreen. The clearing wasn’t a goal. It was an act of fidelity to my own inner silence.</div></P>*


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*<P><div class="text-justify">Now, life is not purer. It’s raw. I walk through it with less to carry, but more to feel. I don’t claim peace. I claim presence. The cigarette left its ghost, but it took the excess with it. Minimalism wasn’t the after—it was the reckoning. Beneath the ash, there was no fire left to light. Only breath. And that was enough.</div></P>*


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***<center>All photographs and content used in this post are my own. Therefore, they have been used under my permission and are my property.</center>***