Buddy story · Stopping
We both stopped, four months apart
Maeve stopped because of cost and Stefan stopped because he wanted to. Neither had anywhere to put that until they had each other.
- Paired
- May 2025
- Cadence
- Sunday mornings
- Status
- ongoing
Both had felt, in different ways, that stopping was a thing you did quietly and then stopped posting. Maeve had drafted a leaving message three times. Stefan had simply gone silent for five weeks and then come back apologising, which Benedikt gently pointed out he had nothing to apologise for.
Their correspondence for the first two months was almost entirely about other people's reactions. The colleague who said "so you gave up then". The relative who wanted to know whether it had all come back. The friend who was visibly pleased. Maeve says the most useful thing Stefan ever wrote was a single line: you are allowed to have made a decision rather than a mistake.
Both are honest that some of what happened after stopping was hard, physically and otherwise, and that they had each read the trial evidence on stopping and were still not prepared for their own version of it. Neither of them frames it as a failure and neither will let the other frame it that way. There is a guide about this at coming off, what to expect, which Benedikt wrote partly out of watching this pairing.
The hardest part was not the physical part. It was how many people wanted me to be a cautionary tale.
I stopped because I could not afford it. That is a fact about a price, not a fact about me, and Stefan is the person who made me able to say it in that order.