Welcome Chris and congratulations on your first week of freedom and healing!  Yes, "one day at a time" is a fantastic focus skill.  Why waste energy or worry over how long it has been or how much longer it'll take when all that matters is here and now, the next few minutes. 

What amazes me most, Chris, is the ability of nicotine fed dopamine pathways to quickly bury all remaining memory of life before dependency, to erase the beauty of  going days, weeks and months without once wanting to smoke nicotine.  Here, you are headed home here to Easy Street to reside with us while being teased with failure by thousands of old nicotine replenishment memories.  Yes, each of those old memories are true, that when a drug addict smokes more nicotine it does in fact briefly satisfy varying degrees of wanting for more.  But the higher truth is that the only way to reclaim a quiet mind where life replaces addiction's chatter is to stick to your original day #1 commitment to stop putting nicotine into your bloodstream. 

As for starting because of Elizabeth and wanting to look "cool,"  trying to find any smoker who still smokes because of their reason for starting can prove rather challenging.  We had no idea of the ability of this chemical to enslave our brain, making its continued use our #1 priority.    

Chris, I leave you with a key message Joel has burned into our brains.  It's that the true measure of nicotine's power isn't in how hard it is to quit but in how easy it is to relapse.  Millions of words here in Freedom's hundreds of thousands of member posts but all can be boiled down to just one rule ... no nicotine just one hour, challenge and day at a time!  Yes you can, yes you have, yes you are!

Breathe deep, hug hard, live long,

John (Gold x12)