I love my lungs, not just because they bring in oxygen and send out CO2, but because they are working hard to keep me alive and to repair themselves from the abuse I was subjecting them to.
It was never personal, I wasn’t setting out to hurt them, I just was.
They are serving me well and over the last few weeks I’ve been clearing out a lot of stuff that I don’t recall breathing in. There’s no way I would sit down and inhale this black stuff that I’ve been coughing out if it presented itself to me as the black stuff in the first place. But it presented itself as a feeling of decreased tension, anxiety, stress, and the cessation of withdrawal symptoms; which are easy to consider positives. Now, a few weeks out, it’s very clear that there was NOTHING positive about them. Withdrawal from poison is a good thing because it means you are healing.
It is kind of shocking though. Some report that you can be clearing the nastiness for months, others claim that nothing ever came-out. I’m somewhere in the middle. Most of my coughing has stopped, but when the shower is really hot or I’m cooking a bunch of food and the humidity in the kitchen is high, I get my cough on and lumps or strains of black come out. I look at them and imagine what my lungs will look like in a few months and years.
For someone who presented themselves as giving a crap about how they looked, I sure didn’t pay much attention to keeping the lungs a nice beautiful pink.