I stopped at week nine and here is why

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.

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

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.

Reading and nodding. Nothing to add, and I wanted you to know somebody had read it.

The circle carried me through the first eight weeks after stopping more than anything else did. Nothing anybody said, particularly. The turning up.

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.

My reason was that I no longer wanted to be doing it, which felt like an insufficient reason until my prescriber said it was a perfectly good one.

What I would say to anybody considering it is to have the conversation before you decide rather than after. My prescriber had two options I had not known existed.

I stopped, and about six weeks later the background hum came back, and that was the part I was least prepared for. Not the physical side. The noise.

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.

Same here, and I am glad you said it first.

The practical thing I got right was writing down why I was stopping while I was still on it. Two months later I could not have reconstructed my own reasoning.

Bramwell, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

What I found hardest was other people treating it as a failure while my prescriber treated it as a normal clinical decision. Their reaction was the difficult part, not the decision.

I stopped because my prescriber said so, which is a very different experience from choosing it, and it took me longer to make peace with because it was not mine.

Bramwell, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

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.

The tapering conversation was more nuanced than I expected. It was not simply stop or continue; there were several shapes in between and I had not known that.

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 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.

Sitting with you on this one.