Chapter Five: The Fire in the Middle

Above the heavy feelings there is a band of hot ones. These have heat and movement in them, and for that reason they can feel like a step up from the weight below. A person who has been flat and grey for years may be almost glad to be angry. At least something is happening. But these feelings are a trap too, and for the vaper a dangerous one, because this is where the addiction lives.

The heavy feelings pull you down, and you reach for the vape to get up off the floor. The hot ones drive you, and you reach for the vape to steer. Either way the hand goes out. What is different here is the speed. Shame builds slowly and you can watch it build. Desire and anger are often on you in seconds. A thought, a heat, and the hand is already in the pocket. So the practice in this chapter is the same practice as before, and it asks a little more quickness of you. You learn to catch the heat while it is still only heat.

There is good news in this, and it is worth saying at the start. Heat is easier to find in the body than weight. A person can search for their shame for a long time and not be sure they have found it. Nobody has to search for their anger. It announces itself. And a feeling you can find is a feeling you can let go.

Desire

Desire is the addiction itself. Strip away everything else and what is left is a wanting, a reaching outward for something that will complete you. The vape is only the current object. Before the vape it may have been cigarettes, or food, or scrolling, or someone's approval. After the vape, if the craving is not released, it finds a new object.

Some people stop and carry the craving somewhere else, to the fridge or the phone, and wonder why they still feel restless and unfinished. The craving was the trouble all along, and the vape was where it had made its nest.

Here is what the craving sounds like from the inside. You are at your desk and a thought arrives. One would be nice. It is a small thought and it has a small voice. You go on working. The thought comes back a little later and it has grown. One would help. It is still polite. It comes back a third time and now it is not asking. I need one. Get up. And you get up. The chair rolls back and catches on the edge of the rug. You push it clear with your foot. On the screen, the sentence you were writing ends halfway across the page.

Watch a craving from the outside once and you will see this. A quiet wish, a louder wish, then a demand that sounds like your own voice and arrives with a reason attached. I have earned it. I am stressed. It is only a small one. Everybody has something. The reason is always ready, and it is never the real reason. The real reason is the craving, and meeting it does not end it, because the next vape makes the next want.

Desire is seductive because it feels like life. It has heat and direction and a sense of purpose. But look at its shape. It says that what you need is somewhere else, and that you are not whole until you have it. A person driven by it cannot rest, because as soon as one want is met another rises to take its place. That is why the vape never delivers. As Chapter Two showed, the relief it gives is relief from itself, and you have been paying for it by the day.

Look at the whole of the bargain and you find there is nothing in the vape to give up. This is hard to believe while you are inside the craving, because the craving tells you that a great pleasure is on the table and you are about to walk away from it. So look for the pleasure itself, apart from the relief. Most people, looking honestly, find a few seconds of the itch going quiet, and then the itch coming back. Once you have seen that you cannot fully unsee it, and the craving loses some of its size.

Letting go of desire is subtle, because what you let go of is the craving, and the vape can stay where it is. When the craving comes, look at the craving instead of the vape. Find it in the body. It is often a leaning forward, a reaching, a tension in the arms or the chest. Allow it. Do not try to satisfy it and do not try to push it down. Let the craving be there, as a feeling, whole.

You will notice something. Wanting, allowed and not acted on, does not climb for ever. It reaches a peak and then it lets go, and in the moment of letting go there is a kind of peace, a fullness that has nothing to do with getting anything. This is the peace the vape promised and never gave.

The craving moves house

When the vape is gone the craving looks for a new address. This is worth knowing in advance, because it comes in disguise. You find yourself in front of the open fridge with no memory of walking there. You pick up the phone to check nothing in particular, and put it down, and pick it up. You feel, an hour after a big meal, that something is missing, and go looking for it in the cupboard.

There is no failure in any of this and nothing here needs fighting. It is the same wanting in a new coat, and you treat it the same way. Find it in the body. Allow it. Let it rise and go. The phone can lie face down on the table while you do this. Watch what the hand does in the next minute. It drifts towards the phone two or three times. Let it drift and let it come back. You are not holding the hand still. Your fingertips touch the corner of the case. You can feel the urge to turn it over and look, though it has made no sound. Your hand comes back across the table and rests beside your cup.

Over the weeks, for most people, the craving met this way has less and less to feed on. It does not vanish, and it does not need to. The wanting underneath it becomes what it was before the addiction took it over, an ordinary part of being alive. You still want things. You want your dinner and your bed and the people you love. But the wanting belongs to you again, and you can say yes to it or no to it.

Anger

Anger is what desire becomes when it is frustrated. You want and you cannot have, and the heat turns outward. For the vaper it wears many faces. Irritability in withdrawal. Resentment of people who comment on your habit. Anger at yourself for not stopping, at a world where you need a vape to get through the day, at the vape itself and the companies that made it and the friend who first held one out to you.

Anger is a step up from fear, because it has heat in it and it faces outward. But it is still a trap, because anger needs an enemy, and as long as you have an enemy you are tied to it. Make the vape your enemy and the fight goes on for ever. Make yourself the enemy and it is worse, because you cannot walk away from yourself.

Allow anger like any other feeling. It is often the easiest feeling to find in the body, a heat, a clenching, a pressure rising. Let it be there without acting on it and without swallowing it. Do not feed it a story. Just let it burn. Anger, fully allowed, burns itself out and leaves a great deal of clean force behind. That force, with no enemy to spend itself on, becomes courage.

Letting it burn means you feel the heat and you do not do the thing the heat is telling you to do. You do not send the message. You do not say the sentence to the person in front of you. You do not take the vape out of the drawer to punish yourself, or to punish them. And you do not do the other thing either, which is to press the heat down and put a pleasant face over it, because pressed-down anger does not go anywhere. It goes underground and waits. You stand in the middle, with the heat in your chest and your jaw, and you let it be as hot as it is, and you watch.

The story is the part to watch. Anger without a story is a heat in the body, and for most people it eases in minutes. Anger with a story can go on for as long as the story does. The story goes: he had no right to say that, and this is typical of him, and I have put up with it for years, and nobody notices what I do. Each line of the story is a log on the fire. You cannot always stop the story from starting, but you can notice it, and each time you notice it you can come back down out of the head and into the heat itself. The heat, on its own, cannot keep itself going for long. It needs the story to feed it. Starve it of the story and it burns down.

The first days after stopping

For most people the first days after they stop are where the anger lives. The body has been asking for something and not getting it, and the asking turns to heat. You are short with people. Small things are unbearable. Someone chews too loudly and you want to leave the room. This is the frustrated wanting turned outward, and it is expected.

Here is the second day, in an ordinary life. You go into the shared kitchen at work to make a coffee and someone has left their washing up in the sink. On another day you would not have seen it. Today it is an insult. You feel the heat come up your neck and a sentence form about the kind of people who do this. Stop there. Heat in the neck, a tightening across the shoulders, a sentence looking for someone to land on. Let it be there. Make your coffee. Do not say the sentence. The heat is still there while the coffee is made and it is less by the time you are back at your desk, and later in the morning you notice you have forgotten the sink.

Two practical things for these days.

Keep out of arguments where you can. If someone wants a fight, they can have it without you. Leave the room. Answer the message tomorrow. The words are still in your head as you go down the stairs. Let them stay there while you put the kettle on. You are declining to pour petrol on a thing that is trying to burn down on its own.

And tell one person, someone safe. I am short-tempered today and I keep wanting a vape. You can say it while you are making the coffee, without waiting for them to ask what is wrong. Being known in this small way takes some of the heat out of the anger, because a good part of the anger was the strain of pretending to be fine.

For most people the first two or three days ask the most, and things ease over two to four weeks. It helps to know that. A fire you know to be short is easier to sit beside than one you fear is permanent. The body is doing something sensible. It is getting used to running on its own again, and it complains while it learns, the way a leg complains when the plaster comes off.

Anger with no enemy

There is a particular anger that comes after the first days, and it deserves its own words, because it is often the last thing the addiction has to throw. It is the anger at what was taken. You look back at the years and the money and the mornings spent coughing, at the times you left a table you loved to stand in the cold with a plastic stick, and you are furious. At the companies. At yourself, most of all, for the years.

Let this one burn too. It is honest, and a person who is still inside the addiction cannot afford to feel it. But watch for the turn where it looks for a culprit to spend itself on. If the culprit is you, it turns into shame, and shame is the road back to the vape. If the culprit is someone else, it becomes a grudge, and a grudge is a rope tied to the past. Neither is needed. The anger can be felt without a verdict. It can be felt as heat, in the chest, on a walk.

Go out with it. When the anger is big and it has nowhere to go, get out of the door and walk. Walk fast if the heat wants speed. Let the sentences in your head run until they run out, and do not answer them. Somewhere on that walk, if you keep walking, the anger becomes something else. It is still hot, and it is no longer aimed. It is a force with no enemy, and you can feel it settle into the legs and the back, and it feels, if you pay attention, rather like being strong.

Resentment

There is one anger that does not burn down on a walk, because it is old. Something happened, a week ago or twenty years ago, and you have carried it since, and now and then you take it out and feel it again. That is resentment from the inside. The word means to feel again. Anger is a fire. Resentment is a fire you keep fed.

You know it by the replayed conversation. Someone said a thing to you across a meeting table, or a family one, and on the way home you ran it back with the reply you did not make at the time, and the reply was better this time, and they had nothing to say to it. Then you ran it again. Somewhere in the second or third run the hand went to the pocket, and you stood on the step, or sat in the car on the drive with the engine off, and vaped while you rehearsed. The grievance and the vape kept each other company. The grievance gave you a reason to go outside and the vape gave your hands something to do while the grievance talked. Many people, looking back, find that the times they vaped hardest were the times they were rehearsing a wrong.

The people who first worked out how to stop drinking, and wrote down what they had learned, put this at the top of their list. Of everything that sent a person back to the bottle, they said, a grievance held did it more often than anything else, more often than the craving itself. This book comes down from that tradition, and so does the practice in Chapter Three, which treats resentment the way it treats shame or fear or wanting, as a low feeling that can be allowed and let go.

A grievance is anger with a story that has no ending, so it never gets to burn down. A fresh anger, allowed, eases in minutes for most people. A grievance, replayed, can hold its heat for years. And a grievance is a feeling you agree with. You do not want to let it go, because letting it go feels like saying they were right, and they were not right. So you keep it warm. And a warm grievance comes with a reason for a vape already attached. After what he did, I have earned one. The vape was never in the story, and then it is the ending of it.

Here is how the practice meets it, starting with what it does not do. You do not argue with the grievance. It may be correct in every detail. The practice does not care whether you were wronged, and it does not ask you to decide that you were not. You do not go to the person. Nothing here asks you to confront anyone, or to have it out, or to make them understand. Forgiveness is not asked of you either. Forgiveness sometimes arrives on its own once the heat has gone out of a thing, and it is not the aim.

What you do is find the sensation under the story. The next time the conversation starts to run, stop and look down. Where is it? For many people a grievance sits in the jaw, or as a heat behind the breastbone, or as a tightening in the hands that were about to make a fist. The breath is often held. Find that. Then let the story go on if it wants to, and do not join in. Each time you notice you have been arguing again, come back down into the jaw or the chest. The story needs you to play your part. Without you it runs out of lines. The heat, left on its own, does what heat does. It rises, it holds a while, and it eases. It may be back tomorrow, and you meet it the same way tomorrow. A grievance fed for years does not go in an afternoon. What changes first is that you are no longer carrying it out to the step.

Do this in private, with the small ones. The colleague who never says thank you. The comment about your vaping, made in front of people. The relative who tells the same story about you at every gathering. These are grudges, and a grudge is let go on your own, sitting down, with nobody else needing to know it was there.

Some resentments are not grudges. Some are about a real harm, done to you, by someone who had power over you, and the heat around them is guarding something. Leave those alone until it is safe. The practice does not ask you to go near the person or the memory before you are ready, and it does not ask you to decide the harm did not matter. If the memory comes while you are sitting with a smaller anger, lift your eyes and name three things in the room. Feel the chair beneath you. You do not have to go back into the memory to finish the exercise.

A grievance let go leaves the same clean force behind that anger does, and often more. People who have done it describe a lightness in the days after, like a room in the house that had been kept shut for years and now has its window up. A good deal of the vaping happened in that room.

There is a small question to bring to the replayed conversation: what happened, and what have I added? A friend has not answered a message. That is what happened. They have had enough of me is one reading of it. They may also be busy, or tired, or unsure what to say. You need not pick the kindest explanation and call it true. You are making room for more than one.

If there is something practical to ask, and this is someone you trust, ask it simply when it suits you. If there is nothing to settle now, let the message remain unanswered while you return to your evening. Put the phone down beside the book you were reading. You have lost your place. Go back to the top of the page and read from there. The phone is close enough to hear when a reply comes.

Pride

Pride is the highest of the hot feelings and the most deceptive, because it feels good. Pride says: I am fine. I do not have a problem. I could stop any time. I am not like those people. I am in control.

Listen to I could stop any time for a moment, because it is the sentence the addiction most loves to hear you say. It has a wonderful shape. It cannot be tested without being risked. As long as you do not try, it stays true, and as long as it stays true there is nothing to do. The person who says it has usually never put it to the test, or tried once, briefly, and stopped trying before the sentence could be shown up. The claim keeps the vape safe by keeping the question closed.

Pride is often what keeps a person going until something forces the matter, a cough that lasts, a child's question, a bill added up. While it is intact there is nothing to admit, and so nothing moves.

Here is pride in the shared kitchen at work. Someone says, lightly, that they thought you were giving up. And you hear yourself say that you are cutting down, that it is under control, that it is nothing like cigarettes anyway. You say it well and the moment passes. And you stand there with your coffee and something in the chest has tightened, because you know the sentence was a lie and you told it to protect a plastic stick. They turn back to the sink and rinse their spoon. You keep looking at them, waiting for another question. They put the spoon on the draining board and leave.

Pride also shows up after you stop. You may feel above the people who still vape. You may feel that you have done something remarkable by your own effort alone. Watch this carefully, because pride is brittle. It needs things to go well. One slip, one hard day, and pride falls into shame, and shame leads back to the vape. A person who stopped by pride has to be perfect, and nobody is.

The letting go of pride is the willingness to be ordinary. To say: I am a person who got caught by this, like millions of others. I am not special in my weakness and I will not be special in my recovery. I need help. I am willing to take it.

This is the humility that the recovery traditions have always pointed to, and it is not humiliation. Humiliation is what pride feels when it is wounded. Humility is what is left when pride is set down, and it is peaceful. It has nothing to defend and nothing to show. It can say what is so and ask for what it needs.

Pride shows itself, too, in what a person will not accept. I do not need patches. I do not need to tell anyone. I do not need a doctor. I will do it my own way. Notice how often the word need appears in those sentences, and how each one closes a door that might have helped. The box of patches sits unopened in the cupboard. You put the toothpaste back beside it and close the door. The person you could tell is downstairs, and you can hear them moving about. Pride would rather go on vaping than be seen to need a hand.

Asking for help

Try it in the smallest way you can. Say to one person, out loud, that you are stopping and you would like them to know. You are not asking for advice and you are not asking to be watched. You want one person to know. Then notice what happens in the body when you say it. Whatever resists, in the second before you speak, is pride, and it is smaller than it sounds. Once the words are out you have stopped carrying the thing alone.

Humility does not mean thinking less of yourself. It means being more interested in what is so than in how you look. The humble person is the one who can say I vape and I want to stop and I have not managed it on my own, in a plain voice. Nothing in that sentence is a confession. It is a description, and a description is the beginning of any repair.

There is a lightness that comes here, and it surprises people. They expected that admitting the thing would feel like defeat. Instead it feels like putting down a bag they had forgotten they were carrying. All those years of being fine, of having it under control, of the joke made before anyone else could make it. Set that down and the whole body breathes out. The person you tell sits beside you for a while. You start to make the old joke and stop halfway through it. Neither of you says much. After a while they ask whether you want some tea, and get up to make it.

The turning point

Something important happens when the hot feelings are released. Below the line of desire and anger and pride, life is about getting, and defending what you got, and showing others that you are fine. The attention faces inward, at the self and its needs. When the hot feelings go, it begins to face outward, at what is true and what is possible and what there is to give.

This turning point is where recovery begins. The person beside you has worries of their own. You ask about the thing they mentioned when they came in, which you barely heard at the time. They tell you again, and you listen.

You may not notice the moment. Most people do not. There is no flash of light. You notice that you have been out of the house for an hour and the vape has not crossed your mind. You notice that someone was rude to you and you felt the heat and let it go, and it did not become an afternoon. You notice that you told someone the truth about yourself and nothing bad came of it. You and the person you told are walking home together. At their gate they search for the key, and you take the bag from their hand while they look in the other pocket. They find it in the lining.