I have spent a lot of time fighting.
Not necessarily in the way most people would understand the word. Some of my battles have been very real, some have been inside my own head, and others have been fought with words, evidence, emails, articles, posts and conversations.
For a long time, fighting has given me purpose.
There is always another argument to make, another paper to read, another statistic to question, another politician to contact, another person to respond to, another piece to write. Tobacco harm reduction has become much more than an interest for me. It became personal because I lived the alternative. I smoked for years. I tried to stop. I struggled. Eventually I found something that worked for me, and my life changed.
Perhaps that is why I find it so difficult to watch people dismiss the experiences of people like me.
I know what it feels like to be talked about rather than listened to. I know what it feels like to see complicated human lives reduced to percentages on a page. I know how frustrating it is to watch policies defended long after the consequences have become obvious.
So I fight.
But lately I have started asking myself a more uncomfortable question.
Who am I when I’m not fighting?
That question is harder than it sounds.
Because when you spend enough time opposing something, challenging something or trying to change something, resistance can slowly become part of your identity.
You wake up and check what has happened overnight. You read the latest research. You see a claim you disagree with and immediately start constructing the response in your head. You notice contradictions that other people probably scroll straight past. You start thinking about the next article before you have finished the previous one.
There is always another battle waiting.
And there is something strangely comforting about that.
A battle gives the day structure. There is a problem. There is something that needs doing. There is someone who needs answering. There is evidence that needs explaining. There is a goal.
It gives you somewhere to direct your energy.
But purpose and peace are not necessarily the same thing.
That is something I am beginning to understand.
Sometimes I wonder whether I have become so accustomed to fighting that peace feels unfamiliar.
What happens when there is no argument to win?
What happens when I close the laptop, put down the phone and stop thinking about tobacco policy, vaping, government regulation, public health or the latest ridiculous claim on social media?
Who is left?
A husband.
A father.
A grandfather.
A friend.
A man getting older who has already lived through more than a few chapters he never expected to experience.
A man who enjoys laughing.
A man who sometimes needs silence.
A man who can sit with a coffee and not have an opinion about anything for five minutes.
A man who doesn’t always have to be useful.
Perhaps that last one is the hardest to accept.
I have spent so much of my life believing that doing something is better than doing nothing. Solve the problem. Help someone. Answer the question. Fix what can be fixed. Keep moving.
There is strength in that mentality.
But there can also be exhaustion.
And perhaps there comes a point when constantly asking, “What needs to be done?” needs to be replaced with another question occasionally:
What do I need?
I don’t ask myself that nearly enough.
Maybe I need an afternoon where nothing important happens.
Maybe I need to laugh at something completely stupid.
Maybe I need to spend time with the people I love without checking my phone.
Maybe I need to allow somebody else to win an argument on the internet simply because I have better things to do.
Maybe I need to remember that the world will continue turning even if I don’t personally respond to every piece of nonsense written about vaping.
That doesn’t mean I stop caring.
It doesn’t mean abandoning advocacy.
It doesn’t mean surrendering anything I believe.
It simply means recognising that a cause should be part of my life, not the entirety of it.
There are people around me who don’t need Alan the advocate.
They just need Alan.
And perhaps I need him too.
That is what I am beginning to realise.
I don’t want the measure of my life to be how many arguments I won, how many articles I wrote or how many people I proved wrong.
I want it to include the conversations that went nowhere but made me laugh, the meals with family, the ordinary afternoons, the friendships, the ridiculous jokes, the quiet drives home and the moments when nobody needed anything from me.
Those moments rarely look important while they are happening.
But perhaps they are the important ones.
Advocacy has given me something enormously valuable. It has given me purpose, introduced me to extraordinary people and allowed me to turn my own experience into something that might help somebody else.
I don’t want to lose that.
But I also don’t want to wake up one day and realise that while I was fighting to make the world slightly better, I forgot to enjoy the small part of the world that was already mine.
So I am not asking myself to stop fighting.
I am asking myself to remember that I am more than the fight.
And maybe learning who that person is again is another kind of recovery.
Perhaps even one of the most important ones.