Begin with an End

this might look sexy

… but freedom feels sexy.

I started smoking cigarettes at 26.

I picked up the habit after I abandoned the life I was supplied with, worked hard to maintain, but ultimately did not feel satisfied with.

I walked away from the degree it took me seven years to accomplish, the job that set me up for a successful career as a reporter, and the relationship that launched my evolution into a compassionate and independent woman.

Then I bought my first pack of Spirits.

I remember the walk and each bend-of-knee, from my home down the road, up to the Circle K on Ocean Boulevard. I remember the gray pavement beneath my slip-ons, and the weeds growing from where each lawn met the mostly quiet road. No sidewalk.

This street was once the last row of a flower farm that existed long ago in Stuart, Florida. Fittingly, they named the street Fini.

And since one of our favorite things to do as humans is name things, we called our house Fini. And that’s exactly where my youth was finished.

It was mostly heartbreak that dragged me to that corner store.

If I smoked, I wouldn’t be so lonely - I’d have something to kiss! But the habit really formed, not because of loneliness, only because of fear.

See, I’d finally made the leap. Took the jump. “Put myself out there.”

My vulnerability was at an all-time high, and I hadn’t known anyone who had ever done what I did: volunteer for poverty in pursuit of the vision in their heart.

Most everyone I knew fit their boxes so well. I didn’t know how to persevere these emotions of a changing identity.

Smoking became the friend I could lean on.

Letting everything go to build upon your own is not easy or even enjoyable. James Baldwin once said, “The artist isn’t free to do what he wants to do. He is free to do what he needs to do.”

It’s true that all I’ve ever been able to do is the work my soul feels like it came here to do. But now looking back six years, I realize that I impaired my purpose and vision when I decided my back wasn’t strong enough to hold me.

My new friend quickly became a master, and I willfully submitted to her daily. I believed she would lighten the load, but she only helped deplete more energy from my life, resulting in more heavy weight, and more reasons not to trust my back alone. Deception.

But I chose those steps down Fini then, like I’m choosing this story now, because the truth is, I didn’t know anything about a backbone… I mostly still don’t… and I’ll leap at every clear sight of freedom to find out.

This isn’t a story about why smoking is bad for you.

This is an obituary for an old friend and lover, whom I’ll miss forever, but never really did do me any good.

By Brittny Charity Valdés