The Lonely Gardener

Abstract

As a child, witnessing addiction was always framed in the sense of extreme, that people knew they were overwhelmingly addicted to a substance, and it would ruin their lives the moment they started using. However, I was unaware of the silent slope that addiction could be and that I had already been on the slide down for quite a while when I was assigned to an abstinence project that would open my eyes. I chose to abstain from nicotine, a substance I had been using for nearly two years at the time, believing it would be easier to quit as it had never been a powerful influence in my mind. When the struggle of the first week hit me like a train, I started to look past my fallacy and see the reality of my dependency on nicotine. Through the help of my accountability partners and the knowledge I gained throughout the course, I made a genuine long-term commitment to quitting smoking when I first believed I would not be able to...