I feel wonderful and I am waiting for the catch

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.

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 most common question in this circle is some version of "is this normal for this stage", and the honest answer is usually yes, with the caveat that if it worries you, ask somebody qualified.

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.

Nothing useful, just that I have been exactly here.

My review at twelve weeks was nine minutes long and the printout I brought did most of the talking. I would recommend the printout to anybody approaching theirs.

I want to say plainly that my first twelve weeks contained one week I would describe as bad. One. The other eleven were somewhere between uneventful and quietly encouraging.

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.

I reread my own notes from week two recently and I sounded genuinely frightened. I had forgotten that. Twelve weeks does more than I gave it credit for at the time.

What I would tell my week-one self: the first twelve weeks are not a trial you pass. They are a period during which you find out how this works for you specifically.

I had two completely uneventful weeks in the middle of this stretch and I found them oddly hard, because I had nothing to report and felt as though I should have.

Halfway through I stopped reading anything outside this site and my own prescriber's advice, and my anxiety dropped noticeably within a fortnight. That was my single biggest change.

Coming back at the end of my twelve weeks to say it was mostly ordinary. I wanted to leave that here, because when I was in week three every account I found was dramatic in one direction or the other.

Read, understood, and glad you are here.

Ozzy G said something I want to sit with for a second.

I kept a note each week with three lines: what changed, what I did about it, what I want to ask. Twelve weeks of that is a genuinely useful document to take to a review.