Day 30 of Quitting

Well, I’m back in Canada and this saga continues, but I’d be lying if I said it’s been easy.

Two afternoons ago, my boyfriend and I landed in Toronto after 21 hours of flying and three days of travel. We had just gotten off a 15-hour flight from Hong Kong to Canada where neither of us slept. The temperature had gone from plus-30 to negative-25 (celsius), no coffee was hitting as beautifully strong as Australian coffee had (iykyk), and a long to-do list was waiting for us on the other side of a 5-hour car ride back to the remote village we live in, up in northern Ontario.

I asked my mum as soon as we got in to car: “Can we please hit the weed and vape shops?”

My boyfriend stayed politely silent after the dispensary, but at the vape shop, he put his foot down. Did I really need to go back to all that?

I grumbled but left the nicotine vape in its packaging for the car ride back to the resort we work on. I left it, and the glorious ounce of premium Canadian cannabis alone. I almost caved before bed but didn’t end up smoking either.

The next day, I stared down the nicotine vape. I talked ad-nauseum with my mum about the pros and cons of hitting my vape (there are no pros); I tried to convince her (myself, really) that it would be fine if I just hit it a couple of times. That I wouldn’t be instantly addicted to nicotine again… right?

I opened the vape and the smell alone made me involuntarily wrinkle my nose. I realized the smell was disgusting to me now. Still, I wanted it… but it wasn’t a physical craving anymore the way it had been. It was more the curiosity factor, combined with the ‘don’t tell me what I can and can’t do’ bratty obstinance factor.

I was annoyed and uncomfortable but decided to put it off a little longer. I told myself I could have it later at my boyfriend’s if I wanted to… except when I got there I realized I had forgotten it at my place, 20 minutes away. I decided to take the forgetting as a sign for the night and kept reminding myself of that golden mantra: one day at a time.

Now that I’m back in my old environment, I keep wanting to smoke, not out of physical craving so much so, as out of habit, availability, and boredom. On vacation, everything is exciting and so it’s easy to not feel bored or to think about the vape. Back at home, it’s much harder to put off, when every old stressor and boredom pit is lurking around the corner.

Ironically, when I went to buy my nicotine vape, I ended up chatting with the salesman about how I had quit a few weeks before. He smiled and told me that he had actually quit vaping 5 years ago. He encouraged me and said that it takes time and that a huge factor would be trying to replace the habit with new ones. Distraction - something that has plagued me my whole life as an ADHD-er - would now become my best friend.

So now I have this 60k puff ‘Mango Pineapple Ice’ 20mg nicotine vape and 28 grams of high-terpene, AAAA, 29% THC and 5% CBD kush… and no real intention to smoke any of it.

So why did I even buy it?

I’m shaking my head at myself, honestly. It was objectively a huge waste of money.

At the same time, my rationale was that having the weed and nicotine and not smoking them at least gave me some more control over whether or not I wanted to continue on my quitting journey.

If I didn’t have either, I could still get my hands on both if I asked a friend to pick up a vape and an ounce for me (we live in an incredibly remote village with none of these shops nearby, so getting weed or a vape would be an ordeal in itself) - but then, I would feel more obligated to smoke them, because of the effort it would take to get either, plus the inconvenience I’d be asking someone else to go through to get them for me. This way, I had weed and nicotine for if I wanted them, as a safety blanket, but without so much of the immediate pressure to smoke them.

I realize this all sounds crazy and like the most excessive of mental gymnastics… but as my mum mentioned: these companies put a lot of effort into making sure it’s hard to quit. So mental gymnastics are sometimes necessary.

I know this next phase in quitting will be hard in a way the first phases weren’t:

Re-acclimatizing to being back in Canada while trying to push through the desire to smoke will be hard; starting work again without vaping will be hard (especially in the restaurant industry…); when the resort season starts again in full-swing and everyone comes back with their own vapes, it will be hard; when my stoner bestie moves back in, it will be hard; and so on and so on and so on and so on.

I realize that every chapter ever will be hard…because life itself is hard and now I am trying to ignore the emotional escape hatch I had relied on for so long.

I remember reading when I was younger that once you’re addicted to something, you’re addicted to it for the rest of your life, even if you’ve been sober for years.

I didn’t understand that back then, but I do now.

I wish somehow, some way, I could have understood without the life lesson involved… understood that I’ve set myself up for a lifetime of wanting nicotine, craving nicotine, thinking about and deliberating on nicotine.

I didn’t fully *get* what that meant back then, but now I do.

I don’t think anyone could have said any combination of words to me then to make me stop, to prevent me from learning this lesson first-hand. But I’m still going to write these words… just in case maybe it helps someone else either not start vaping or at the very least, feel less alone in their own quitting journey.

I also have to say a massive thank you to everyone who has left supportive comments on my posts about quitting. I can’t tell you how much they help. When I’m struggling or thinking about going back, I think to all the kind words that have been left, the stories people have shared about their own journeys or the journeys of people they know and love, and I am reminded that there is another side to this struggle.

Originally, I started writing about this experience just to distract myself from my own cravings. In a way, I’m still doing just that: distracting myself and trying to form new habits, learning how to fill the time with something other than smoke and fog, retraining my brain to create its own dopamine again... I couldn’t have anticipated how supported I would feel in this process, or how many new feelings and people I would meet as a result of embarking on and writing about this journey.

I’m curious and excited to find out who I am without the nicotine and the weed. I’m curious to see how I spend my time, energy, and money, now that I have more of all three. It feels kind of like coming back to who I was when I was a kid, before I got into all this. I find myself reverting to old hobbies from when I was younger. I’m reading more, writing more, drawing more, listening to music again, being a little more active… even though I gained weight when I first stopped smoking nicotine, I’ve lost a bit of it again now (especially without the munchies from smoking weed!)

I’m reading-introducing myself to the girl I once was.

It’s nice to see her again.