Everything tastes wrong and I did not expect that

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.

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.

The thing nobody tells you about the first twelve weeks is that you are learning a body that keeps moving. By the time I had a rule for something, the rule needed updating.

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.

That is a kinder way of putting it than I have managed about myself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My week six was much harder than my week two, which I had not expected at all. I had assumed it got monotonically easier and it does not always go in that direction.

Something that helped me through the middle stretch: I stopped judging a week by the last day of it. Fridays were always the worst read on how the week had actually gone.

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.

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.

The weekly rhythm of this circle carried me through the first twelve weeks more than any single piece of information did. Turning up on a Thursday to say a small thing was enough.