That is an honest position, and it deserves an honest response. Not a lecture, not shame, and not a list of reasons you should feel differently than you do.

Identity follows behavior, but not immediately. The shift from "smoker trying not to smoke" to "person who doesn't smoke" happens through accumulated evidence, not through deciding to feel different.

Because smoking was present everywhere and the brain encoded the association between smoking and almost every context of daily life. What feels like everything reminding you of smoking is the cue network you built, now visible for the first time.

By separating what the cigarette was actually providing socially from what it appeared to be providing and discovering that most of it was never about the cigarette.

By understanding that cigarettes never actually produced relaxation and that the brain already has its own relaxation mechanisms, which smoking was suppressing rather than supplementing.

You build a deliberate post-meal ritual that occupies the slot the cigarette held, because an empty slot is more dangerous than a filled one, and the circuit will fill it for you if you don't fill it first.

Possibly, and the honest test is not how often you smoke but what happens when the social situation arises and a cigarette is available. If the answer is that you reliably smoke, the circuit exists regardless of the label.

By addressing what stress actually is physiologically and replacing what the cigarette appeared to do with interventions that do it more effectively and permanently.

Not one thing. Smoking was doing several different things simultaneously, and each function requires its own specific replacement, which is mapped to the moment and not applied generically.