Tapering versus stopping — what my clinic offered

My stop was abrupt because of a supply problem rather than a choice, and I want to name that as its own category. It happens and it is nobody's decision.

I would gently suggest keeping your journal going through the stopping. Mine is the only reason I know what actually happened in those months rather than what I remember happening.

Six months off and I am fine. Different, and fine. I came back to this circle to say so because when I was leaving I could not find anybody who had.

Thank you for writing this down. It helped.

I stopped and did not go back, and I am at peace with it, and I would not present that as a recommendation to anybody. It was my situation and my body.

What helped me was deciding in advance what I would do if things changed after stopping, so that I was not making that decision from inside a difficult month.

Nobody here is going to think less of you for stopping. That was my genuine fear when I posted about it, and it was completely unfounded.

I came off for eight months and went back on, and I want both halves of that on the record because threads that only cover the leaving are only half a story.

My prescriber's line was that stopping is not a door closing, and she was right in my case. Going back later was a conversation, not a re-application.

Something practical: I kept everything — the notes, the dates, the letters — for a year after stopping. It made the eventual conversation about restarting take four minutes instead of forty.

The grief part surprised me. I had not expected to grieve a medication and I did, for about a month, and then it passed.

This is the honest version, and the honest version is harder to write.

Honest note: my first month off was much better than I had feared and my third month was much harder. The order surprised me.