Chapter Seven: Making Peace

Above courage there is a plateau, and it is a good place to rest. The air is lighter here. You are not fighting any more. The world has gone on turning, and so have you. What is asked of you now is a kind of settling. You make peace with what has been, with what is, and with the people your addiction touched.

Nothing in this chapter has to be done today. Some of it may not be for you at all, and you will know which parts those are. Read it the way you would walk a path on level ground, looking about you, in no hurry to reach the end.

There is an order to what follows, and it is the order in which these things tend to arrive. First the quiet. Then a readiness to take part in things again. Then a clear look at what the habit cost, and where it cost other people. Then peace with the person you were while you vaped, which is the hardest peace and the one that holds everything else up. And last, acceptance, which is the ground an ordinary day stands on. You may find them in a different order, or find two at once, or find one and wait a long while for the next. None of it is a test.

Neutrality

The first feeling on this plateau is a quiet one. It is the feeling of being unbothered. Things can go either way and you are alright. A craving comes and it is not a crisis. Someone offers you a vape and you say no thanks without a speech. A hard day happens and you let it be a hard day. The bus is late and you stand at the stop with your hands in your pockets and the lateness of the bus is the whole of what is wrong.

Picture a laundrette on a wet afternoon. The washing is in and the drum is turning and there are forty minutes to get through. This was the kind of gap the vape was for. You would have stood under the awning with the rain coming off its edge in a line, and gone back in with the taste of fruit in your mouth and forty minutes reduced to thirty-five. Now you sit on the plastic bench. You watch the clothes go round. A woman at the far end folds towels into a bag and the radio is on in the back and the window has steamed up so that the street outside is a blur of headlights. Nothing in you is reaching for the door.

This neutrality is not indifference. It is how a person feels when they have stopped needing things to go a particular way. For years your inner life was arranged around one need, the next hit. Plans and moods and evenings out, all of it bent towards that. When the need is released a great weight of tension goes with it, and what is left is an ease that may feel strange at first. Let it be strange. You will get used to it.

Some people are unsettled by the ease and go looking for the catch. It can even feel flat, as though the colour has come down a shade. If that is how it is for you, know that it is usual. For years the vape put on a small drama every half hour, a want and the easing of the want, and a day without the drama can seem empty at first, the way a house seems empty on the day the builders leave.

It helps to remember what Chapter Two showed, that the relief each hit gave was relief from the last hit. On the bench in the laundrette there is no discomfort to ease, and so there is nothing to miss.

Notice, too, that neutrality is where the addiction's stories run out of fuel. The story said you would be anxious and deprived and miserable without the vape. And here you are, on an ordinary afternoon, and you are none of those things. You are here. The story was wrong.

And notice what has become ordinary that was once an emergency. The first coffee. The car. The slump in the middle of the afternoon. The pub garden. Each of these was once a place where a small alarm went off and a hand went to a pocket. Now they are places. If a craving does come at one of them, it rises and eases and goes in the way you have learned, usually inside a few minutes, and you carry on with what you were doing. You lift the cup. The coffee has cooled while you were talking, and you drink it while the person opposite finishes what they were saying.

The quiet no

There is one more thing neutrality brings with it, and it catches people off guard. With the urges quieter, something else has come forward to take their place. Somebody asks you for something, and yes is out of your mouth before you have decided anything.

There is a reason this arrives now. For years, going outside for a vape was the one way you left a room without giving a reason. Nobody argued with it. You stood up and went out and came back, and for those five minutes nobody could ask anything of you. The vape did your refusing for you. It was your excuse and your break and your closed door, and now it is gone, and the no is yours to say, out loud, in a sentence.

So practise a small one. A second helping. A favour you would rather skip. A plan you do not want to make. Say it in one sentence to someone safe, as Chapter Ten describes, over something that matters little, and then stop talking. If you add reasons, the reasons will be answered. If nobody safe comes to mind, wait until somebody does.

Then watch the ten seconds after. For most people it is a great deal less than they feared. Sometimes a little guilt comes in afterwards. Guilt is a feeling in the body, and you know by now what to do with a feeling in the body. Let it be there. Let it rise and ease and go. It says nothing about whether the no was right, only that you are out of practice at saying one.

Before a small no, you can notice what you expect. They will think I am difficult. They will be annoyed all evening. Afterwards, look at what was actually said and done, leaving the rest unknown. A pause is a pause; it is not yet a verdict on the relationship. Perhaps the response was easier than expected. Perhaps it was not. You can learn about the person and the timing without deciding that all boundaries are safe, or that none are.

Keep this practice small and with someone you trust. If your hand shakes at the thought of their name on your phone, choose someone else. A person who threatens you or controls where you go is not someone to practise on. As you practise saying no, keep caring for your body and the people who depend on you. Take your tablets from their packet as usual, eat your meal, and answer the child who needs you. Practise with the offer of another spoonful when your plate is empty.

Willingness, again

The willingness you offered in the turning now takes a more active form. It becomes a readiness to take part in your own life again. To say yes to things. To do what needs doing without resentment. To help where help is needed.

In the turning, willingness was a door open a crack, enough for something to come in. Here it is a door open wide, and you walking out through it into the day. You will see it first in small things. You return the call you have been putting off. You put the bins out without being asked. You say yes to the walk you would have found a reason to miss. You stay at the table after the meal instead of going out to the step. Someone is still eating. You lean back in the chair while they finish, and when they ask you to pass the water you fill their glass before your own.

You may find that you have more energy than you know what to do with, because what went into craving and hiding and being ashamed is now free. Let it find its way outward. Do something for someone. Take up something you set down. Fix the gate that sticks, the drawer, the call you owe. Nobody is asking you to keep busy so that you do not notice the cravings. This is only what a person does when there is room in them again.

Or you may not feel it yet. The call can still look like a chore. You sit with the phone in your hand, tired, and cannot think what you will say after hello. Be willing anyway. Willingness does not wait until you feel like it. It is a direction you face, and you can face it tired.

The recovery traditions put being of use to someone very near the centre of a recovered life, and Chapter Ten says why. For now it is enough to know that a person who has carried a neighbour's shopping up the stairs that day has less room in them for the old story.

Looking at the harm

Something belongs to this stage that belongs nowhere else. It is the putting right of things.

The honest account you wrote in the turning will have shown you that the addiction had consequences, and not only for you. Maybe you were short with people while you were withdrawing, or lied about how much you used. There may have been evenings when you were in the room in body only. Money went to the shop that was needed at home. You vaped in air that other people had to breathe. A child may have watched you and learned something you never meant to teach.

Take the money first, because it is the plainest. Open your bank statement on the phone and search the name of the shop. Then scroll. There it is, four times in a week, some weeks six, the same small sum over and over down the screen. Add a year of it and the total is a boiler, or the trip you said you could not afford, or two months of the food bill. Read it line by line the way you would read anyone's statement. It is only arithmetic. You scroll back to the top and check the sum once more.

Look at these plainly. The old shame would only make it about you again, so leave the shame out of it. This happened. It had effects. Some of them can be put right.

Here the recovery traditions offer a distinction that is worth keeping close. Shame says I am bad. Guilt says I did a thing that had a cost. Shame stands at the bottom of the ladder and wants you to hide, which is where the vape lived. Guilt is higher up, because it can be acted on. You cannot do anything about being bad. You can do something about a cost. So when you look at the harm, keep it in the second voice. I did this, and it cost that, and here is what can be done about it. Name those costs.

Then address them. Where you can, and where it would do no further harm, go to the people affected and make it right. That may be an apology, or money paid back, or a change in how you behave that says more than words could. It may be turning up, present and clear and reliable, for as long as trust takes to grow back.

The apology is the smallest part. What people remember is the change that follows it. If the harm was absence, the repair is presence, given over months and not announced. If the harm was money, the repair is money, or the plain fact of the shop no longer appearing on the statement. If the harm was a child watching, the repair is the child watching now, and seeing a parent who sat with a hard feeling and did not go outside. None of this needs a speech. The best repairs are the ones nobody has to be told about, because they can see them.

This is not about earning forgiveness, though forgiveness may come. It is about clearing the wreckage so that you can walk forward without stepping over it every day. Harm left where it fell turns into guilt, and guilt is one more thing the craving can feed on. Putting things right takes that away.

Where repair stops

Repair is offered, never required, and it belongs only where two things are true at once. The harm was real, and putting it right is safe.

Take the first. Do not go looking for wreckage. If the honest account showed little harm to others, then there was little, and that is the truth of it, and it is a good truth. Some people, arriving at this stage, feel they ought to have something to repair and go about inventing it, apologising to people who were never hurt and confusing them. Others take a harm that was small and make it enormous, because the old shame has found a new coat to wear. Neither is looking plainly. Look, and then decide for yourself what, if anything, is owed.

Take the second, and take it seriously. There are people you do not go to. You do not have to knock on the door of someone who has hurt or threatened you, whatever you owe them. Leave the message unsent if they could use it to hurt you again. The traditions that gave us this practice put a limit on it: not where doing so would injure them or others. Your hand is on the phone, and you count among those others. Put it down. A debt can be repaid through someone else; a change in how you live does not need a visit.

And some harms are yours to know and nobody's to hear. A thing that would only wound the person told, or that would hand them a weight to carry so that you could set yours down, is not repaired by telling. It is repaired by the change in you, and the change is enough.

The hidden thing

Most people who vape have one thing about it they kept hidden. How much, really. What it cost across a year. The time they said they had stopped and had not. It sits there, and it weighs more than its size, because a thing only one person knows has to be carried by one person, and there is nowhere to set it down.

This is the last of the hiding, and it belongs to the same practice as the account you shared in the turning. Being seen entire, and not turned away from, is among the best things that can happen to a person. The hidden thing is the part of you that has not yet had that.

Picture your sister's kitchen on a quiet afternoon. The children are in the garden and the radio is on low and she is at the sink with her back to you. You say the sentence. I told you it was one a week. It was nearer one a day, for about two years. You say it and you stop. You do not explain it or apologise for it or promise anything about it. She turns round. What she says is hers, and you do not have to answer it. Then she goes back to the sink, and you pick up the tea towel, and the kitchen goes on being a kitchen.

What tends to happen is quieter than people expect. Your sister hands you a plate. You dry it and reach for the next. There is a mark that will not come off, and you give it back to her. Through the open window you hear one of the children calling for the other to wait. Your sister asks you to open the back door.

Or not now. That is a whole answer. If there is no one safe to hear it, or you do not want to tell it, keep it. It keeps. Nothing about your freedom depends on its being said, and the person who hears it, if anyone ever does, is yours to choose.

It is worth asking, while you are here, what else you learned to hide alongside the vaping. Hiding spreads. A person who hides a device learns to hide a mood, and a debt, and a doubt, and a whole way of being half in a room. Once the device is in the open, the other doors come unstuck more easily, and you may find yourself saying plain things to people that you have not said in years.

Making peace with yourself

The hardest amends are the ones you owe yourself.

Your body has carried this addiction for years. It has taken in the chemicals and adjusted to the cycles. It has put up with the cough and the short breath and the broken sleep. It has been used as a delivery system for nicotine when it was meant to be the home of your life. It is owed an apology, and more than an apology, it is owed care.

Begin to treat your body as something in your keeping. Drink water. Sleep. Walk. Breathe deep for the plain pleasure of air going into lungs that are clearing. Notice your sense of taste and smell come back. Notice a breath go further down than it used to. Notice a morning when you wake with something you did not have to manufacture.

The care is ordinary. You were used to doing something for your body every half hour, and the thing you did was harm it. Now the thing you do is feed it on time, and put it to bed at a sensible hour, and take it out into the daylight. The body does not need grand gestures. It needs the small ones kept up. A body that has been treated as a delivery system for years takes a while to trust that the care is going to continue, and the way you show it is by continuing.

And make peace with the person who vaped. That person was not bad. That person was in pain, and reached for the nearest relief, and got caught. You need not hate them or disown them. The person standing behind the bins with the device cupped in one hand is tired. There is a chair inside and food still warm on the table.

It is easy, some weeks out, to look back at that person with contempt. The hiding behind the bins. The money. The hand going to the pocket in the middle of somebody's sentence. The promises made in the morning and broken by the afternoon. Contempt feels like distance, as though despising them showed that you are someone else now. But contempt is shame turned outward, and shame is the ground the vape grew in. Despise the person who vaped and you are back at the bottom of the ladder, and the bottom of the ladder is where the hand goes to the pocket.

So try another way of looking. That person was caught by something built for catching people. The device was designed, by clever people with a great deal of money, to set up a discomfort and then sell the easing of it, over and over, to a nervous system that could not tell the difference between relief and pleasure. There was no moral failing in it. A trap worked as it was made to work. The person who vaped walked into a trap that was made for their exact shape, and stayed in it because the trap was made to be stayed in. Then, at some point, they began to look for the way out. Someone in pain, who was caught, and who kept looking.

Ask what that person needed that they were not getting. Rest, most likely. A minute alone. Something to do with their hands while a feeling went through. A way to leave a room. Some of those needs are still yours, and the difference now is that you meet them without the device. The person who vaped was trying to meet them the only way they knew. They were looking after you, badly, with the wrong tool. You do not have to be fond of them. You can stop prosecuting them and let them sit down.

If this stirs more than you expected, that is usual. Many people find that forgiving themselves for one small thing brings up a great deal that had been waiting. Let it come. Let it rise and ease and go in the way you have learned, and do not add a story to it. And if you find you are not ready to be kind to that person, say so, and say why, to yourself or to someone who knows you. You can say it with your eyes on the cup in your hands. The person beside you can hear it without your having to look up.

Acceptance

The plateau ends in acceptance, which is the feeling that things are as they are and that this is alright.

Acceptance is often mistaken for resignation, for giving up. The two could hardly be more different. Resignation has stopped looking. It says nothing can change and turns its face to the wall. Acceptance looks straight at what is here, this minute, with the washing-up half done and the rain coming in sideways, and says yes, this, and from here anything can happen.

Sit on a park bench at lunch. The sandwich is in its paper on your knee and the pigeons have noticed. There is a wind coming across the park with the smell of cut grass in it and a man on the next bench is on the phone about a delivery. This is the hour that used to be for the vape. You would have eaten fast so as to have time for it, and stood by the railings, and gone back in with the hour half used. Now the hour is the hour. You eat slowly. You notice the breath going all the way down, further than it used to, and you notice that noticing it is a pleasure. A craving may come, because this was one of its places. Let it. It rises and eases and goes, usually inside a few minutes, and you are still on the bench, and the pigeons are still there.

For the vaper, acceptance is the release of the last struggle. You accept that you were addicted, and that stopping was needed. A craving may still come now and then, and it rises and falls and goes, and you let it. There are hard days ahead, and a hard day is no reason to reach. And you accept the person you have been and the person you are becoming, and ask neither of them to be different.

Acceptance is the ground an ordinary day stands on. You get back from the park and there are emails waiting. One asks for something you have already sent. You find the attachment and send it again. There is a piece of grass on your sleeve, and you brush it onto the floor beneath the desk. The man on the bench is probably still waiting for his delivery. You remember the way he kept saying his address, louder each time, as though the driver were at the other end of the park. Someone at the next desk asks what you are smiling at.

In acceptance, the vape becomes a thing you used to do. It is no longer an enemy, or a temptation, or a piece of who you are. It is something that happened, that is over, that you have set down. When you can think of it with that kind of ease, the addiction has lost its grip.

A month on, and a year on

What the months and the year look like from here is a late bus and a wait at the stop. Somebody who sees you most days says that you seem calmer. You do not know what they mean. You have been looking at the money and the harm and the person who vaped, and none of that felt calm from the inside. Then you think back over the morning. The bus was late, and you stood at the stop with your hands in your pockets, and it did not occur to you to mind. You remember a woman asking whether this is the stop for the hospital. You looked at the route on the glass beside you and found it, three stops after yours. When the bus came you stepped back to let her on. You had to wipe the rain from your glasses before you could see where to sit.