T The Poison I called a Friend

Dealing with nicotine withdrawal is a bleak experience. it makes you question many things, not just the craving itself, but the person you were when you invited in in your life.

i know and remember clearly, how it started. it was born from pure hatred for my ex-partner, and more likely for myself as well. That is why I never stopped vaping after I left that relationship.

The habit outlived the man who inspired it, because of she self-loathing that fed it had not yet had been dealt with.

And my living conditions after that relationship were anything but ideal. There was no stillness in which to heal, no firm ground from which to make good decisions.

So I kept inhaling, kept numbing, kept choosing the easy dopamine over the hard work of feeling.

Now I am dealing with the aftermath. Irrational outbursts, waves of anger that rise from nowhere and crash before I can contain them.

I find them difficult to control, but I will have to do my best to weather through these days while my brain re-calibrates.

I am already four days down. One or two days left of the worst, perhaps. I can see the far shore from here, even if my hands are still shaking.

What I cannot fathom, with the mindset I have today, is how much I must have hated myself to start this stupid habit in the first place. How deeply I must have despised myself in those years. But then again, that is the same reason I was finding myself in a very abusive relationship.

I poisoned my life with him as I poisoned my own lungs daily and call it coping mechanism.

To hand my body’s chemistry over to a device and never ask what I was running from, just when it was too late.

I do not want to lose this battle. And I will not.

I had handled bigger changes and worse withdrawals, coming off antidepressants was a far crueller beast than this, so in time, this should feel like a joyride by comparison.

And yet, impatient as I am, I already ache for the moment that awaits me on the other side.

The moment when I am free to breathe fully, when my body produces its own dopamine again, earned and not borrowed, with the right tools in my hand instead of a vape.

When the calm I feel is mine, truly mine, manufactured by a brain that has finally remembered how to do its job without being propped up by poison.

I am nearly there. And I will not turn back.