Chapter Six: The Turning

There comes a moment, and it may come many times before it takes, when you stop running.

You have looked at where you are and seen what a craving is made of. You have learned the practice of letting go and begun to release the weight below and the fire in the middle. And now something in you is ready to face this directly, with something steadier and more open than the clenched fist of willpower.

The name for that is courage.

People imagine the turning happening somewhere grand, with a change in the light. It tends to happen in a garden shed with the rain loud on the roof, or on a bench outside a chemist while you work up to going in.

What courage feels like

Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the willingness to act while the fear is there, to let it be felt and to go forward anyway. For the vaper it is the willingness to say: I am going to stop, and I am going to feel whatever comes, and I am not going to reach. You feel it before you act, as a readiness underneath the fear, and you know it for what it was afterwards, when the thing is done and you are still standing.

There is an old saying in the recovery rooms that half measures get you nothing, and it sounds hard until you see what it is protecting you from. A half measure is stopping with one hand while the other hand keeps a pod in the car. It is saying I'll see how it goes. Courage is no louder than that. It is only more complete. It says the whole sentence, and then it goes and does the washing up.

Courage has a particular quality in the body. Fear pulls in and courage opens out. There is a settling, a straightening of the back, a sense of resources coming to hand. It feels quiet and able, with no triumph in it.

You may be surprised how ordinary it feels. People wait for courage to arrive as something they would see coming, and then they miss it when it comes, because it came as a small readiness to do the next thing. You put the phone down and stand up. You walk into the chemist. It feels less like bravery and more like being able. Brave is what it looks like from the outside. From the inside it is mostly a straight back and a plain decision.

Of the places this book has described, from shame up through fear and desire and anger and pride, courage is the first where a person can stand. Below it the feelings ran you. Fear told you the world was against you and the vape was the one friend in it. Pride told you that you had it handled and needed nobody. At courage something turns over. The world stops being a thing that happens to you and becomes a thing you can work with. The craving is still there, and so is the fear of the first hard evening, and you find that you can look at both and not flinch. It is a place to stand, more than a mood, and once you have stood there you know the way back.

You may notice, at this stage, that your relationship with the cravings has changed. They still come, and you are no longer at their mercy. You can feel them, allow them, and watch them go by, the way you would watch a bus you are not getting on. You can stand in the middle of something hard and not be destroyed by it.

Some days it is like that and some days it is not, and both are usual. On the good days the craving goes past. On the other days it stops and opens its doors and waits with the engine running, and you stand there and let it wait. Courage is for the second kind of day. Nobody needs it for the first.

Ten minutes

The first act of willingness is small enough to fit inside any day, and you have met it already. It is the minute you met in Chapter Two, made longer. When a craving comes, look at the clock and note the minute. Then do something ordinary with your hands for ten minutes. The waiting is the act.

Say you are in the garden shed. It is raining and the roof is loud with it and the vape is in your pocket where it always is. You take it out and set it on the bench among the seed packets and the twine. You look at your watch. Then you do the thing you came out to do. You oil the shears. You sort the pots by size. You find the trowel you thought you had lost. The craving is there the whole time, like someone standing in the doorway, and you go on working with it there. Later you look at your watch again and it is twelve minutes, and the person in the doorway has gone, or is smaller, or is still there and you are still working.

What you are finding out is what an urge does when it is kept waiting. For most people, most of the time, it rises, holds for a minute or two, and starts to loosen before the ten minutes are up. Some days it holds the whole ten and longer. You put the shears back on their hook and still want the vape. There is soil on the bench where you tipped the pots out, and you brush it into your hand. You carry the cracked pot to the door and leave it there to take back to the house. The rain is still coming down. You stand in the doorway and watch it.

Do this once or twice a day, when a craving comes. If the waiting makes the day worse, stop and look at the room.

When you do vape at the end of the wait, notice that the relief is relief from the vape, as Chapter Two showed, and notice how hard it becomes, with a clock in front of you, to believe that stopping means giving anything up.

After the wait, give yourself one honest line. What did you expect the ten minutes to be like, and what were they like? Perhaps the craving stayed while you sorted the pots. Perhaps it eased and came back, or stayed much the same. None of these needs dressing up. You are finding out how a craving and an ordinary task can share some time, and what support belongs in the next part of your plan.

This is how willingness acquires knowledge. It tries a thing before it knows, and afterwards it listens to what actually happened. Do not make the account say the exercise worked if it did not. A plan that can be changed is more useful than a brave sentence you have to defend.

The admission that opens the door

At the heart of the turning is an admission, and it has two halves.

The first half you made in the first chapter: I cannot do this by my own will alone. You have tried, many times, and the trying was not enough. There is no failure of character in that. It is what is so. The addiction is stronger than the willpower of a person standing alone.

The second half is the one that changes everything: and there is something greater than my own will that can.

You do not need to define this. You do not need to give it a name or a theology. You need only be willing to turn towards it. It may be the plain power of honest company, which has carried millions of addicts through what they could not do alone, or the intelligence of the body, which closes a cut without being asked, or the stillness beneath thought, which has never craved anything, or what people have always called God, or love, or life. These are perhaps one thing seen from different sides.

What matters is the turning. The willingness to let go of the idea that this must be done alone, by force, from the small tired controlling place that has been losing for years, and to open instead to something larger.

The turning is a small movement, and nobody sees it. It can be made on a weekday morning with the radio on and the toast under the grill. It does not need a room full of people or a hillside. It needs one honest sentence said inside yourself with nothing held back.

Try saying it: I cannot do this alone. I am willing to be helped.

There may be a resistance when you say it, a flare of pride. Under the resistance, if you let it pass, there may be a great relief. The burden of doing it all yourself was heavy, and you have set it down.

For some readers the something larger is God, and they have a way of speaking to it already. Others feel the old resistance to the whole idea and want to skip this part. If that is you, let the something larger be entirely practical for now. The pharmacist who knows more about nicotine than you do. The friend who picks up the phone. The body, which sets about closing a cut before you have thought to wash the blood off. Or the plain fact that people stop every day, which means the thing is possible and does not depend on you being special. Any of these is bigger than the small tired controlling place, and any of these can carry you. The name can come later or never. The help is the same either way.

Honesty

Courage brings honesty with it. You cannot stand up to something you refuse to look at, so the two arrive together.

For years the addiction has needed you to be dishonest, mostly with yourself, about how much you vape and what it costs, about what it does to your breathing and your sleep and your mood, about how much of the day is arranged around it and how you feel about yourself because of it. All of this has been softened and looked away from.

Courage lets you look. Looking is a different thing from punishing yourself, which is only the old shame back under another name. You look line by line, at what it cost and at what you did and did not do because of it.

There is a practice here that the recovery traditions have used for a long time, and it is simple: write it down. Take a notebook and make an honest account. A plain inventory, with no drama in it. What has the vape taken from you? What have you done under its influence that you regret? What feelings have you used it to avoid? Who has been affected? Where has it made you smaller, less present, less honest?

It is uncomfortable, and it clears the air. The addiction needs you not to look too closely, and this is looking. When you see the whole picture on paper, the stories the addiction tells lose their grip. It is hard to believe the vape helps you cope when you have written down, in your own hand, everything it has cost.

Start the account with the easy line, which is the honest answer to what the vape does for you. You named its jobs in Chapter One, and they were small. Write them here again, plainly, and do not argue with them. The addiction would rather you were a little embarrassed by them, because embarrassment keeps you from looking further. Look further.

Then write why you want to stop, and write it the way you would say it to a friend across a kitchen table, with nobody grading it. The version on the packet is not yours. Yours may be the money, or the cough on the stairs, or the way a small plastic thing gets to decide where you stand at a wedding, or that your daughter watches your hand go to your pocket. Whatever is true. A reason in your own words is a reason you can find again on a bad evening.

Count the spares too, the jacket pocket and the glovebox and the shelf in the shed, and decide what will happen to them. Nothing needs to leave the house today.

The honest look ends the argument, because it shows what Chapter Two showed, that the relief the vape gives is relief from the vape. Seen on paper, in your own hand, the fear of giving something up starts to look strange. There is a small physical need that eases, and there is a large story that ends when you stop believing it.

One person

Once it is written, tell someone. Find one person you trust, someone who will not judge and will not try to fix, and tell them what you have seen. Speaking the truth aloud to another human being does something that private reflection cannot. It breaks the isolation the addiction depends on, and it makes the admission real, and it gives you the experience of being seen entire and not turned away from, which is among the best things that can happen to a person.

It can be as small as one sentence. I'm going to stop vaping. Picture the kitchen in the evening, the washing up done and the radio off. You lean against the counter with the phone and ring the one person. You say the sentence. There is the small pause on the line that any true sentence gets. Then they say oh, right, I did wonder, and ask if you want to come round for tea, and the call goes on to other things, and you hang up and stand by the counter a moment longer. You put the phone down beside the draining board. There is a cup upside down on a plate and you lift it by the handle, letting the water run off its rim. Then the phone lights up. They have remembered the bowl you left at their house and want you to remind them to give it back. You write back that you will. The cup goes into the cupboard.

Choose someone safe, as Chapter Ten describes. They do not need to do anything with it. They do not need to check on you or ask how it is going or cheer. They need only to know. And if it is not right today, not yet is an honest answer, and the sentence keeps.

Honesty with another person has a second half, the small true thing said out loud. In a conversation you say I don't mind when you do, or that's fine when it is not, and each time you are a little less in the room. That is the same reflex that kept the vaping private. It smooths the surface and steps outside. Courage, once it has a foothold, starts to say the true small thing instead. I'd rather the other place. I didn't enjoy that, to be honest. Said plainly and then left where it lands, without managing how the other person takes it. They may shrug, or change the subject, and you let them. They may ask which place you mean. You tell them, the one past the post office, and they say they have never been. You walk there together. At the door you stop to read the menu while they look through the window for an empty table.

The way you will stop

Willingness needs somewhere to go, and the next place it goes is the plain question of how. You can stop at once or step down towards a stop. People stop by each of them, every day of the week. Either way, you can choose whether to use nicotine support: patches or gum or lozenges. Each route is honest, and this book has no opinion on which suits you. What goes wrong is choosing nothing and drifting towards a day that never arrives. So decide how you will stop and whether you will use support, and if another way suits you better later, change the plan. A chosen way is a way you can get ready for.

If you want to know what nicotine support would mean for you, take the question to the pharmacist. Picture the bench outside the chemist. You sit on it for a while before you go in, watching the door open and close, feeling the particular foolishness of being about to ask a stranger for help with something you told yourself you ought to manage alone. Then you go in and ask. It takes four minutes. They have been asked before. You come out with a leaflet and a plan, and sit on the bench again to read the part the pharmacist pointed out. You fold the leaflet along its old crease and put it in your pocket. Someone comes out carrying a paper bag, holding the door with their shoulder for the person behind them. You move your coat to make room on the bench. Stopping that way is stopping.

Whichever way you choose, write the plan down in words you would use out loud. What the vape does for you. Why you want to stop. How you mean to go about it. Where the spares are and what happens to them. The three moments in a day when you reach most, and what you will do in each of them instead, small enough to manage at four in the afternoon on a bad day. A glass of water drunk standing up. Out of the back door and once round the block. A text to the person you rang. Deciding now puts the answer where you can reach it later, in the moment itself, when thinking is at its slowest and the hand is already moving.

The quiet no

There is one more thing to get ready, and you can do it alone in a room with the door shut. Practise saying no. Out loud, so the mouth knows the shape of it. Something short. No thanks, not today. The shortness matters. A long no has reasons in it, and reasons are things another person can argue with, and by the time you have defended your reasons you are already halfway to taking the vape to end the conversation. A short no has nothing in it to catch on. You say it and the evening carries on.

You will use it on the last train home. It is late, and the carriage is bright and mostly empty, and someone you half know sits down across from you and takes out a vape and offers it across, without thinking, the way you would offer a mint. This is the moment the addiction has been saving up for. The old habit of smoothing things over says take it, it's easier. The rehearsed no is already in your mouth. No thanks, not today. They shrug and put it away and look out of the window, and the train goes on through the dark, and the lights of the next station come up along the carriage.

Say it first to someone safe, if you can, someone who has agreed to offer and be refused, so that the first time is a rehearsal rather than a test. It feels silly for about ten seconds. Then you have a sentence that is yours and ready, and there is a kind of ease in that, the ease of a thing already decided.

Willingness

The last element of the turning is willingness, and it is worth telling apart from wanting.

Wanting is desire: I want to stop. You have wanted to stop for a long time and it has not been enough. Willingness is different. It is a yes said to the whole of it, with no outcome attached. I am willing to feel this. I am willing to be helped. I am willing to let go of what I have been holding. I am willing to be changed.

Wanting has a picture of the end in it, and it wants the picture. Willingness has no picture. It agrees to the next ten minutes, and to the phone call from the kitchen, and to the bench outside the chemist, without knowing how any of them will go. Confidence needs to know how the thing turns out. Willingness has agreed to find out. You do not need to feel ready for any of this, and most of the people who have stopped did not feel ready when they did. Willing to find out was enough, and it is where they began.

Willingness does not need to be strong. It only needs to be present. Even a small willingness, a door open a crack, is enough for something to come in. The recovery traditions say that willingness is the key, and they are right, because willingness is the one thing that cannot be forced. It can only be offered. And once offered, it is the channel everything else flows through.

It can be mixed with doubt and still be the real thing. You can be willing and frightened in the same minute. You can be willing on the walk to work and unwilling by lunch and willing again when the light goes at five. Nobody reaches it once and keeps it. It is a direction, and you turn back towards it, and the turning back is the practice, and it gets easier because you know the way.

One form willingness takes before your day is the kindness you wrote in advance in Chapter Four, the lines to a friend who slipped, read back as if they were written to you. Keep them somewhere you can find them on a bad evening. The willingness to be helped includes the willingness to be helped by yourself.

So offer it. Offer it each morning, and each time a craving comes. I am willing. Let the words be a prayer if that is natural to you, or a plain statement of direction if it is not. You say them with the toast still under the grill. One edge is beginning to burn, and you reach for the plate. You lift the toast out with a fork. There is someone moving about upstairs. You call up to ask whether they want a slice, and wait with your hand on the bread bag until they answer.