Chapter Ten: The People Around You

The addiction lives alone. Each reach for the vape was a small private deal between you and the device, and the shame that grew around it drove you further in. Nobody saw the reach in the car. Nobody saw the one in the garden at midnight. Stopping turns this the other way, and the turn is more than a matter of spirit. Stopping is catching. It travels through the people you know. Things that look mechanical work too: money for staying stopped, even a text message arriving at the right hour.

Picture a works canteen at half past twelve. Trays and the clatter of them, forty people at long tables, the same jokes as yesterday. You ate with them for years and then, most days, you went out to the far end of the car park on your own, and you stood by the fence with the thing in your hand and looked at your phone so as not to look like a person standing by a fence. Nobody joined you, or the same two people did, and you talked about nothing while you all breathed in. Then you came back with mint on your breath and a small lie ready in case anyone asked where you had been. At the table someone was finishing a story you had missed, and you laughed with the others.

This chapter is built on more than research. It is also about something the recovery fellowships found long before any researcher measured it, which is that a person who is truthfully known by one other person is far harder for an addiction to keep.

Say it out loud

The simplest social act is telling people you have stopped. It sounds small. It is a large thing. Said aloud to another person, a decision becomes real in a way a private resolve never is, because now you live up to it in front of someone. It also closes the secret door. If nobody knows you have stopped, nobody knows when you slip, and the addiction has always counted on that.

Tell your partner, your family, your close friends, the people you work beside. Say it plainly, as you would say you had a new job. Then tell them what you would like from them, which is to know, and to ask now and then how it is going. Nobody needs to police you.

Choose the people you trust, the ones whose reaction you can guess before you speak. Someone who would use it against you does not need to know. One safe person who knows is worth more than a room full of people who half-heard.

Safe means something particular here. It means a person whose reaction you could write down in advance and be right about. Leave out anyone you are in conflict with, anyone you answer to at work, anyone you have been avoiding and anyone you are a little afraid of, whatever the history and however much you feel you owe them. This is a decision about your own footing, and nobody else's feelings come into it. If the list comes out at one name, speak to that person. If it comes out at no names, you can begin with an adviser at a stop-smoking service. You can tell them about the vape without telling anyone at home or at work.

Say it in the canteen, over the tray, to the one person there you would tell anything to. I've stopped vaping. I'm not after a fuss, I'd like you to know. Then let the conversation move on, because it will. They may nod and go back to their soup. You pick up your spoon. Across the table someone asks whether the seat beside you is taken, and you move your bag from it.

You are allowed to say both halves of what you want. I would like you to ask me how it's going, once a week or so. I would rather you did not check my pockets, or say anything if you see me struggling, or tell the others. Most people are relieved to be told what to do with the news. They were going to guess, and they were going to guess wrong.

Being known

There is a reason the recovery fellowships put so much weight on one person knowing the whole of it, and the reason is shame. Shame is the lowest place a person can stand, lower than grief and lower than fear, and its whole method is concealment. The vape was hidden, and so the vaping had to be lied about, and a person who is lying about one thing gets into the practice of hiding others. Ask yourself, without hurry, what else you got into the habit of keeping back in those years. Where the money went. How you were feeling. Whether you were sleeping. The hiding spread, the way damp does, from the one room into the rest of the house.

A thing said to one safe person weighs less the moment it is said, and there is nothing mystical in why. Carried alone, a fact has to be managed. It has to be kept out of conversations and steered around and remembered. Once one other person holds it with you, the managing stops, and the part of you that was doing the managing is free for other things. People say the same about every hidden thing that was ever told, from debt to drink to the vape in the glovebox. The telling was worse in the dread than in the doing, and afterwards the air was easier to breathe.

The moment before you say it, fear rises, the same fear as the one under a craving, and it goes down while you are still talking, as Chapter One described. Often, after they have taken it well, there is a strange exposed feeling. That too is a feeling in the body with a story attached, and the story is that you have given something away. You gave away a secret.

When someone takes it badly

Sometimes a person takes it badly. They roll their eyes, or say you'll be back on it before long, or make it about themselves, or tell the whole office by three o'clock. It stings, and the sting is worth looking at, because the addiction will try to use it. What a bad reception tells you is something about that person, on that day. It tells you where they are and what they have to spare. It tells you nothing about whether you can stop, and nothing about whether you were right to speak. You said a true thing to someone you thought was safe, and you learned they were less safe than you thought. Cross them off the list without a speech and tell the next name.

If you find yourself wishing you had never said it, notice that the wish is shame talking, and shame has been talking to you for years. It says the same thing each time, which is that the world would prefer you hidden. The world would not. The world is mostly people carrying something of their own, and a good number of them are glad of the company.

The words you use

There is a small finding from the study of self-control that is worth more than its size. People who refuse a thing by saying "I don't" keep to the refusal far longer than people who say "I can't." The first says who you are. The second says what you are being denied, and a denial opens a negotiation.

So do not say you are trying to quit, or that you cannot vape. Say: I don't vape. Say it to others and say it to yourself. It names a person who does not do this, and that is you now. Say it before it feels settled. The recovery traditions have always done this, and the research agrees.

Practise it before you need it, because you will need it. Someone on the five-a-side pitch offers you one at half-time, the way they have a hundred times, without thinking. I don't vape. Three words, said the way you would say you don't take sugar. There is no explaining to do. The other person looks at you for a second and the game goes on. They put it back in their pocket. Someone at the other end calls for the ball, and you roll it across with the sole of your boot. There is still a little of the tightness in your chest when it comes back to you and you turn with it.

There is a deeper reason the words matter, and it comes from the man who saw that the prison was built of belief. "I can't" is the language of a person being deprived. It assumes there is something in the vape to be denied, a pleasure or a comfort the rest of the world gets to keep and you do not. There is nothing there to be denied. The relief the vape gave was relief from the vape, as Chapter Two showed, and a person who does not vape has nothing to relieve. So "I don't" is the exact sentence. It describes a person who is missing nothing. Nobody says "I can't" about a thing they do not want.

Your network

Habits travel through relationships. When researchers followed thousands of people across decades, in a study of smoking rather than vaping, they found that stopping moved through the people they knew in clusters. When one person stopped, the friends and husbands and wives and brothers and sisters and workmates around them became much more likely to stop too. And the people who went on smoking drifted out towards the edges, among others who went on.

You can use this in two directions. First, look at who you vaped with. Those friendships are good and they can stay. The shared ritual is the trouble, because it is a cue, and for a while it helps to change the setting. Meet them somewhere else. Do something else together. Say plainly that you are stepping back from the smoking-area talk for a bit. Second, find the people who have stopped. Each of them is a pull in the right direction, and each is a plain demonstration that it can be done.

The five-a-side pitch is a good example, because the game itself was never the problem. It was the ten minutes after, by the cars, when everyone gets their breath back and the vapes come out and the talk is at its best. That ten minutes is a cue as sharp as any you have, and it is worth arranging differently. Stay on the pitch and take a few more shots at an empty goal. Walk to the car with the one who does not vape. Drive off first, for once, and message the group from home. The lads are still your lads. What you are stepping around is a ritual, and a ritual is easier to sidestep than a friendship is to lose.

On the other side, look for the people who have stopped, and there are more of them than you thought. Somebody at work went out with you for years and stopped coming out, and never made anything of it. Somebody in the family gave up smoking a decade ago and has not mentioned it since. These people are no club, and there is nothing to join. You only have to know they are there and let yourself stand a little nearer to them. Something moves between people who have done a hard thing and people who are doing it, and it moves without anyone giving a talk.

The research found one more thing, and it is kinder than it sounds. The people who went on smoking did not become worse people. They drifted, the way anyone drifts towards those who share a habit. Drift the other way, then, towards the ones who stopped.

Listening without fixing

Here is a practice that belongs in the same book as the craving, though it looks nothing like one. Let someone talk for five minutes and fix nothing. Choose a person you are at ease with and let them go on about whatever they like. Your neighbour on her front step, on an evening when you have both come out for the air, telling you about the boiler that is making the noise again and the man who came and looked at it and went away. Nod. Ask one question if you like. Keep the conversation on her side of the step.

For most people this is the hardest thing in the chapter, and the reason is one you already know from the inside. Watch what happens in you around the second minute. Something tightens under the breastbone. A sentence starts to form, and the sentence is what she ought to do about the boiler, and your mouth is already opening to give it to her. You know this shape. It is the shape of the reach, the pressure and the sentence and the hand moving before you have decided anything. So do what you have learned to do with it. Let the advice rise, and let it sit there unsaid, and let it go cold. She goes on about the boiler. You go on nodding. After a while the pressure goes down of its own accord, the way the other one did, and she is telling you how she sat in with her coat on, waiting for him. You ask whether he is coming back. She looks through the door at the boiler and says he has not answered his phone.

You may never learn whether it helped her. Most people can feel the difference between being heard and being handled, whether or not they say so, and they come back to the ones who hear them. If it turns heavy, or goes somewhere that is unsafe for you, end it kindly and go in.

This is how the fellowships have always worked, one person talking and one person listening and nobody being told what to do. The listening goes both ways. The one who listens is learning to let something rise and pass. The one who talks is being let out of a room.

Asking for something small

Somewhere in your week there is a job you have been doing the long way round. Bringing the shopping in from the car in three trips because a hand felt like more than it was worth asking for. Working out the route alone rather than ringing the person who drives it every day. Going without, because going without was simpler than saying the sentence. If you hid a vape for years you are probably out of practice at asking. A hidden habit teaches you to manage on your own, and after a while you are managing everything on your own and calling it independence.

So ask someone you trust for one small thing. A lift to the station. Five minutes to look at a letter you do not understand. The name of a plumber. Help getting the wardrobe up the stairs. Not money, and nothing that costs them much. Say it plainly, with the apology taken off the front and the explanation taken off the back, so that the request can stand on its own. Could you give me a lift to the station? Then stop talking and let them answer.

They may say no, and you are no worse off than before you asked. They may say yes, and then there is a second practice, which is to be helped without making it up to them and without keeping a tally in your head. Most people are glad to be asked. Being trusted with a small thing is a compliment, and it is one you have been withholding from everyone for years.

The reason asking is hard is pride, and pride is a place on the ladder a good way above shame and a good way below the open country. You read earlier that letting go of pride means being willing to be ordinary. An ordinary person needs a lift to the station. Say so.

The small request can teach you something about fear too. Before asking, notice the prediction: I will be a nuisance. Afterwards, notice the answer you actually received. Do not turn a yes into proof that everybody will always help, or a no into proof that nobody will. You asked this person, for this thing, on this day. That is the size of what you know. It is enough to help you choose the next request more clearly.

Giving unasked

The other half of asking is giving, and the kind that matters here is the kind nobody asked for and nobody sees. Take your neighbour's bins in on the morning they are out. Leave a bag of apples from your tree on her front step without a note. Wash the mugs at work that are not yours. Say one sentence to the woman on the till beyond hello, about the queue or the rain, and then let it drop.

None of this is for thanks, and if thanks come they were never the reason. What you are doing is turning something round. For years the addiction had you taking, a little from the day, a little from the money, a little from the people who worried, and it made you into a person with a hand always half out. An act of giving with nothing in it for you is the plainest way of finding out that the hand can do something else. Notice what happens in your chest as you walk away from the step. Most people describe a small warmth, and then a wish to do it again.

If the woman on the till does not take up your sentence about the rain, nothing is lost. You said a thing out loud to another human being.

A companion

Better than an audience is a companion. Find one person who is also stopping, or who has stopped, and agree to check in with each other, daily at first. A message is enough. How was it. Did you reach. What was under it.

This is the buddy system that stop-smoking services have used for decades, and it is also, in a small form, the fellowship that has carried people through far worse than nicotine. Two people who are truthful with each other about the same struggle make something neither has alone. There is a place now where the story can be said aloud and heard for what it is. If you have no such person, a local stop-smoking service will often pair you with an adviser, and that is a good substitute. So are the online communities of people quitting vaping, as long as you go there to be honest rather than to perform.

Picture the text at eleven at night. You are in bed and the day was long and the craving has come back, the way it does when you are tired, and you have typed a message and not sent it. Send it. Bad one tonight. Not going to, but it's loud. Then put the phone face down. Your thumb rests against the edge of the phone for a moment before you take your hand away. There is a glass of water beside the bed. You drink some and lie down again, with the sheet pulled up over your shoulder and the phone still turned away. When the reply comes it says something ordinary. Same here last night. Go to sleep. And most nights you do.

What makes a companion different from an audience is that the truth runs both ways. An audience you can perform for. A companion has been in the same place and cannot be fooled, and does not want to be, and that is the relief of it. You do not have to look well. You can say you thought about buying one on the way home and sat in the car outside the shop for four minutes. They will not gasp. They will tell you about their own four minutes, and the two of you will laugh, and the shame that would have grown around those minutes never gets started.

The companion who has been through it is the best of all, and this is where the recovery fellowships made their one great discovery. A person who has stopped can sit beside a person who is stopping in a way no doctor and no book can. They know the hour it gets loud. They know the lie that says one would be fine. When they say it eases, you believe them, because you can see that it did. If you know such a person, ask them. Most are honoured to be asked, and a good number have been waiting years for someone to ask.

Company without another verdict

A companion can help with anxiety without having to settle it for you. It is half past nine and you are on the sofa with someone you trust. There are two mugs on the low table and the television is on, though you keep missing what is said. You turn your mug by the handle. Are you sure there's nothing wrong? They answer, and for a few minutes you can follow the programme again. Then you wonder whether they only say it because they can see how frightened you are. You turn towards them. It is the sixth time you have asked. There is a difference between asking someone to sit beside you and asking them to promise that nothing is wrong. The first offers company. The second gives you a few minutes of relief, and now you need another answer.

You know this from the search in Chapter One. You read an answer, feel easier, then wonder whether it applies to you and open another page. Here the answer comes from the other end of the sofa. You want it to make you certain that nothing will go wrong, including after the mugs are washed and you both go to bed. They cannot know that, any more than the next page on the phone can. You can believe that they mean what they say and still feel the question coming back.

If you recognise that pattern, say what would help in its place. I keep asking the same thing tonight. Could you sit with me for a bit? You don't have to promise me it's all right. You can say this while your stomach is tight and you still want the promise. They put their mug down. Could we talk about your day for a while? Let them tell you about the bus home, which stops behind a delivery van, and the argument through the driver's window. You miss part of it while you wonder again whether you are all right. Ask what happens next. The question can stay unanswered while you listen, just as it can while you watch another scene of the film. Ask someone you trust, and let them say what they have room for too. They may have a little time before they need to go to bed. They do not have to take the uncertainty away with them, or keep answering until you can sleep.

This is no instruction to become silent about suffering. Tell someone when you are struggling. There may be a question you need help putting into words: could you help me write down what I want to ask the doctor, and then leave it until the appointment? You pick up the phone and write it together. Read it back so it says what you want to ask, then set the phone on the table. The doctor's instructions still hold when you put down the phone, including any checks you have been asked to make. A friend is not required to decide whether a symptom is anxiety, and neither are you.

Beside you, your friend reaches for their mug and asks where they got to about the bus. You remember the van blocking the road. There is still a tightness in your stomach, and you want to know what the driver says. You ask. They settle back against the cushion to tell you.

The fellowship

Beyond the one person who knows, and beyond the companion who texts back, there is a larger company, and most of it you will never meet. Somewhere this morning a person stood in a kitchen with the same empty hand you have and found something else to do with it. Somewhere a driver at the services has gone since last night and is eating a sandwich slowly. On the next bus, in one of the seats you cannot see from yours, there may be a person who has gone a whole day without for the first time in years, and you would not know which one, because a person going without looks the same as anyone else looking out of a window. You are among them. You have been among them since the morning you stopped.

The recovery fellowships came upon this without looking for it. The first of them met in rooms, and they thought the help was in the room, and some of it was. What they learned over the years that followed was that a person in another town, who had never met any of them and never would, could be carried by the plain fact that they existed. Somebody else was doing this. Somebody else had gone to bed wanting one and got up without, and that knowledge, with no face on it and no name, was enough to get a stranger through an evening. People stop together even when they never meet. A meeting is one place the fellowship can be seen. The fellowship itself is the fact of the others.

Hold that fact for a minute, because it is true at this hour and true at three in the morning. Every hour, somewhere, a person feels the craving rise and keeps their hands where they are, and it eases, and they go on with what they were doing. It happens in a staff toilet and in a hospital corridor and in a parked car outside a school. It was happening the whole time you stood by the fence, and it is happening now, while you read. Nobody counts it, and nobody could. The number is large and unknown, and when you let one go, you add to it. Your stopping is a small contribution to that number, the same size as anyone else's, and the number is made of nothing but contributions that size.

There is no membership in this and no list of names. You will never be told who the others are, and you cannot tell them from anyone else in the queue at the post office. Any of them might be. The woman ahead of you with the parcel. The lad with the headphones. You have no way of knowing and no need to know. The woman shifts the parcel to her other arm as the queue moves. You take a step forward. The lad lifts one side of his headphones to hear the person at the counter, then goes to the window they point to.

The fellowships noticed one more thing, which is that the people bound by the same trouble would never otherwise have mixed. A solicitor and a scaffolder. A girl of nineteen and a man of seventy who has not been well. They would have had nothing to say to each other at a wedding, and they have the hour it gets loud in common, and the lie about the one being fine, and the four minutes outside the shop. That is more than most friends have. It is why the company holds without anyone in it having been introduced.

If you want the fellowship with faces on it, it is there to be had. A stop-smoking service, a quit group in a library room on a weekday evening, an adviser who has sat with hundreds of people at the point you are at now. Some people want the faces and go, and are glad they went. Some never go and belong all the same. Going is one possibility among others, and nobody is keeping a register.

This afternoon, at the hour you used to go out, stand in whatever queue the day gives you, or take the bus if there is one to take. Look at nobody in particular. Somewhere in it, for all you know, is a person doing today what you are doing, and neither of you will ever find out.

Support that arrives by text

One of the few interventions with real evidence for vaping specifically is also one of the humblest, and it is the text message. Programmes that send tailored daily messages to people who are stopping, with the recorded advice and encouragement of others who have been through it, have raised quit rates among teenagers and young adults in large randomised trials, by roughly a third in relative terms. There is no mystery in how. A message at the right moment is a hand on the shoulder from someone who understands, and it interrupts the loneliness in which the reach happens.

If such a programme is open to you, join it. Let it carry the voices of others who have stopped, and let it ask you how it went. A message that arrives at the hour you used to reach, saying somebody else once stood where you are standing, is a small thing, and you can read it while the kettle boils. Then you put the phone down to make the tea. Their words are still there when you pick it up again.

You can arrange the same without any programme at all. Ask your companion to message you at the hour you used to go out. Ask them to send nothing clever. Half ten. Thinking of you. The words matter less than the arrival. What the message does is remind you, at the moment you were most alone, that you have company.

Skin in the game

There is one more social lever, and it has some of the strongest evidence of any technique: commitment with a cost. In studies of people stopping smoking, those offered a financial reward for staying quit, or who put up their own money and got it back only if they stayed quit, stopped at noticeably higher rates, and the effect persisted after the money stopped. What the money buys is attention. A stake makes the decision vivid, and it makes a slip cost something the mind can feel.

You can arrange this yourself. Some people put a sum with a friend and get it back after a month without vaping. Some agree a reward with their partner. Some give their companion the right to ask, weekly, and to hold them to it. The arrangement only needs to be real and to be known by someone else. If money in it strikes you as distasteful, leave the money out and keep the shape, which is a promise made to someone who will ask.

Tracking

Keep a count. Days since your last vape, cravings felt and let pass, money not spent. Keep it for the evidence, and keep pride, which you have learned to be wary of, out of it. The addiction's story is that nothing changes and nothing will, and a visible record of days says otherwise each time you look at it. On a difficult day, the sight of the number is a reason to make it one more.

If you slip, the practice already done stays done. Keep the record of what happened and what helped; there is no requirement to reset a count or erase the days behind you.

Count the other things too, because days are one measure and a blunt one. Count the cravings you let pass, because each is a feeling you watched rise and go down without your hand moving, and a person who has done that forty times knows something about themselves that no number of days can tell them. Count the money, and put it where you can see it, and buy something with it that the person who vaped would never have bought. Count the mornings you woke without the first thought being where the thing was. That count grows slowly, and then one morning you notice it is most of them.

A month on, and a year on

A month on, the people around you have mostly stopped mentioning it, and somebody new has started in the office, and you have seen them go out to the fence with a thing in their hand, and felt a pull towards them that has nothing to do with wanting one. They come back as you are rinsing your mug and stand beside you at the sink. You move the washing-up liquid within their reach.

Being of use

The last social act is the most important, and it is the one the recovery traditions place at the end of the road for a reason. When you are some way along, find someone who is where you were and help them. Answer their messages and say what was under your cravings. Sit with them through a bad hour.

Nothing protects your own freedom like being responsible for someone else's. Their bad hour asks you to sit beside them, even when you have nothing left to say. The years you spent caught turn into something another person can use.

This is why it comes last, though you can answer the phone while your own cravings still come. When you are sitting up with somebody at eleven at night, telling them that it eases and that four minutes outside the shop happen to everyone and mean nothing, you are hearing it too, in your own voice, and some part of you that never believed it from a book believes it from you. Your own craving, if one comes that night, is small next to theirs, and you find you have let it go without noticing.

You do not need to be far along. A person who remembers sitting outside the shop with the engine off is someone the newcomer listens to more readily than any expert. You can tell them how you sat there looking at the door, and how you turned the key and drove home. And you do not need to be wise. What the person in the bad hour wants is company, and the plain fact that you were where they are and you are still here. Say what was under your own cravings, because it gives them permission to say what is under theirs. Say what you did in the car outside the shop. Say that some nights were loud and you slept anyway.

Then notice what has happened to the years. The addiction told you they were wasted, and for a long time you believed it. Now the exact knowledge of what it was like, the hour and the lie and the pull, is the one thing the person in front of you needs, and nobody else in their life has it.

So one lunchtime you walk out to the far end of the car park, where the new person is standing by the fence looking at their phone, and you stand beside them with nothing in your hands, and they tell you about the hour it gets loud.