Soon I started noticing some changes. Some physical, most psychological. Every day I’d wake up full of energy, full of life. You know what they say about the endorphins and all that cowabunga jock crap? It’s not a conspiracy theory set up by gym owners after all. I know I’m a nobody by most people’s standards, but I can vouch for them.

Never in my entire life had I felt so energetic, except maybe when I was a kid and my energy levels used to be labelled as hyperactivity. I noticed that my mind had sort of cleared up. Like my physical inactivity, alcohol and smoking had been numbing me down and, finally, I was fully awake and sober. I realised that the only time I wouldn’t feel like that would be when I’d be abroad. I’d be too busy running around from one adventure to another to be smoking or drinking. And that’s exactly why I’d think of Malta as a prison. I’d go back to the same unhealthy routine the minute I set foot on the island.

That said, to this day I have no idea what got me to give up smoking and start working out. For all I know, it could have been that all-time low I had reached in Hungary. My body pleading for me to treat it better. Thing is, since then, I’ve relapsed and quit time and time again. The psychological addiction that had seemed to vanish reappeared – slowly and insidiously – until I caved and had one drag from a friend’s cigarette at a party. That one drag became an entire cigarette and that one cigarette became an entire packet. Soon enough, I’d picked up the habit yet again. 

And you know what? I quit again. It was even easier the second time round. I may not know what made me quit the first time, but at least now I know what I stand to lose when I smoke. The physical symptoms that I suffer from whilst smoking, the ones I can expect in the future, the self-loathing, the stigma, the everything. And that’s why it’s easier for me to quit each and every time I relapse now.