I know that when I went off, even vaping 24mg, I felt god awful for days. I'm usually pretty logical and down to earth when it comes to facing problems, emotional or otherwise, but I pretty much fell apart for several days. Towards the end of the first day, I was stricken with paralyzing depression. And it stuck with me for the rest of that week.
I would get so stuck inside my own head that I couldn't function out in the world. I wasn't even sad. I just felt numb - dissociated, even. There was a particular unreality about the way I was experiencing things. My thoughts didn't race like some people seem to report - they came to me very slowly... ...agonizingly slowly. There are stretches spanning for hours where I couldn't tell you what I was thinking about. I just remember a looming sense of dread and timelessness.
It wasn't just mental, it was physical. Sluggish movements, achy joints, painful migraines, that nonspecific tightness in the chest, total loss of appetite, intolerance for exercise, lethargy... ...the paradoxical sense of urgency, all of it.
I think that if I had checked myself into a psychiatrist's office on one of those days, I would have been diagnosed with acute clinical depression. You would swear I was traumatized or something. I just completely shut off.
I will say that I'm glad I went the quick and painful route though. It worked well as a motivator to keep me from looking back and honestly, just riding it out felt like a huge accomplishment. I learned a lot about myself and I think I came out of it that much stronger as a person. Vaping brought me very little comfort through it all, so I had to learn to face that darkness without crutches really quickly. It was a rough week... ...just one really rough week.
Where vaping really saved the day was over the gradual process of uprooting and re-appropriating deeply-ingrained psychological habits.
