I smoked my first cigarette at 23 in a parking lot behind a bar in South St. Louis. I was with friends, it was late, someone had a pack of Camel Lights, and it seemed like the thing to do. Twenty years later I was still doing it, which is how casual decisions can compound into the defining facts of a life.

I want to be honest about what twenty years of smoking looked like from the inside. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t desperate. It was profoundly ordinary. I smoked on my way to work. I smoked in my backyard after dinner. I smoked in my car during long drives. I smoked when I was stressed and when I was relaxed and when I was bored and when I was happy. The cigarette was ambient. It was just there, the way furniture is there.

I’m a Christian and have been my whole adult life. I attend a mid-sized congregation in west St. Louis County, and about five years ago I joined a small group that meets on Wednesday nights at someone’s house. There are eight of us. We’ve done Bible studies together, we’ve been through each other’s family crises, we’ve sat with each other through illness and grief and job losses. These are people who know me.

My pastor had preached a message about stewardship that included health and the body, and it planted something in me that I couldn’t shake. I came home and sat in my backyard and smoked a cigarette and thought about that message for a long time. I was 43. I had been smoking for twenty years. My mother had COPD. I already had a persistent morning cough that I had been explaining away for years.

I brought it to my small group on a Wednesday in early January. I told them I wanted to quit smoking and I was scared to try again because I had failed before and I didn’t want to fail in front of people. Saying that out loud was harder than I expected. The group was quiet for a moment and then one of the women, Sandra, said: “Then don’t do it alone.”

My doctor put me on Chantix. She was careful and thorough about explaining how it worked, that it blocks the nicotine receptors so smoking becomes less satisfying and cravings diminish over time, and she was also careful about the potential side effects, particularly the mood-related ones. She wanted me to check in with her every two weeks for the first two months. I appreciated the attentiveness.

I started Chantix a week before my quit date, which is how the medication is designed to work. That first week was strange. I was still smoking but cigarettes started tasting wrong. By day five they tasted genuinely bad, which I had been told to expect but still found disorienting. My quit date was a Tuesday.

The small group was doing something every Tuesday that month: a group text thread specifically for my quit. I would text at key moments and at least one person would respond within minutes, day or night. Sandra texted me every morning for the first two weeks just to check in. Not long texts, just: “How are you doing today?” And I would answer honestly. Some mornings were fine. Some mornings I typed “rough” and she would call me.

Chantix handled the physical architecture of the craving. This is the best way I can describe what the medication did for me. The craving would start to form and then it would kind of flatten out before it got to full intensity. I still had moments of wanting to smoke, particularly in high-stress situations, but the raw edge was significantly reduced. I did experience some vivid dreams, which my doctor had warned me about. They weren’t nightmares exactly but they were strange and very detailed. That settled down after the first month.

The hardest moment happened at week six, and it had nothing to do with the medication working or not working.

My sister called on a Friday morning. Our father had been hospitalized overnight with a cardiac event. He was stable, but we didn’t know that yet when I got the call. I drove to Barnes-Jewish Hospital in a state I don’t have a precise word for. Somewhere between terror and numbness. My father is my person. He’s 71 and still sharp and funny and he coached my kids’ soccer teams and he is one of those people you can’t imagine the world without.

He was okay. He was more than okay actually; the doctors caught something and fixed something and he was sitting up in bed by afternoon making jokes about hospital food. But by the time I knew that, I had spent about four hours in a waiting room in a state of raw fear, and during those four hours I thought about cigarettes constantly. Not in the abstract way I thought about them when a craving passed through. This was the smoking-as-emergency-response that had been baked into my nervous system for twenty years. This was the cigarette as the way you get through things you can’t otherwise get through.

I texted the group from the waiting room. I told them what was happening with my dad and I told them I was struggling. Within fifteen minutes there were seven separate responses in that thread. One of the members, Kevin, who works at the hospital system across town, drove over to sit with me. He just showed up. We didn’t talk much. He just sat there with me until we heard my dad was okay.

I did not smoke that day. I sat with Kevin and I prayed and I did not smoke.

That moment clarified something for me about what community means in the quitting process. The Chantix was managing the physical side competently. But faith is not primarily about the physical. What almost broke me in that waiting room wasn’t a nicotine craving. It was the learned belief that cigarettes were how I coped with fear. Dismantling that belief required the presence of actual people who could offer something better: themselves.

I finished the Chantix program over twelve weeks total. My one-year smoke-free date passed quietly, with a dinner at Sandra’s house where the group celebrated with me.

There is something I’ve started doing in the past year that I didn’t plan but that has become important to me. When women in our church mention they’re struggling to quit smoking, they get connected to me. I’m not a counselor. I don’t have any training. I just have experience and a phone. I tell them what Chantix did and didn’t do for me. I tell them about the small group thread. I tell them about the hospital waiting room. And I tell them that the faith community they’re already part of is a resource they can use for this, if they’re willing to be honest with the people in it.

Smoking is a solitary act even when you do it in company. You’re mostly alone in the craving, alone in the decision to light up, alone in the shame of it (if you feel shame, which many of us do). What broke through for me was refusing to be alone in the quitting.

If you’re reading this and you’ve been hiding your smoking from the people in your life, or you’ve been afraid to try again in front of them because of what failing would mean, I understand that fear specifically. I had it too. What I found on the other side of admitting it was that the people who love you don’t need you to succeed privately. They want to help you succeed together.

Talk to your doctor about Chantix if you’re curious about it. Tell your people you’re trying. Let them show up for you. You are not in this by yourself unless you decide to be.