I keep forgetting to eat and then feeling awful

Something I did not anticipate was how much I would want to talk about it and how little the people around me would want to hear about it. This circle absorbed the difference.

Ollie, answering your question directly rather than going round the houses.

Weeks three and four were when I stopped waiting for something to happen and started noticing things that already had. Different way of looking, same twelve weeks.

The bit I underestimated was how much of the first twelve weeks is logistics — collections, dates, where things live, who knows. The physical side took up much less of my attention than the arrangements did.

A small thing that made the whole stretch easier: I set one calendar reminder for the day before, not the day itself. Being reminded on the day was always slightly too late to be useful.

Twelve weeks in I finally understood that the steep part is the learning, not the medicine. Once I knew how my own week worked, everything got quieter.

Saying it out loud helps other people say it too. Thank you.

Something in the middle of this stretch will probably surprise you, and it will probably not be the thing you have been bracing for. Mine was sleep. I had prepared for everything except sleep.

Weeks four to eight were the steepest part for me. Everything was changing slightly every week and I could not tell which changes were the medication and which were just November.

My most useful early habit was writing down the question the moment it occurred to me, because by the appointment I could never remember what had been worrying me at eleven at night.

Around week nine I stopped noticing it. Not because anything dramatic changed, but because it had become part of the week rather than an event in it.