When did your energy come back

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.

Marking that I am here, in case that counts for anything today.

Weeks one to twelve for me were: strange, quiet, difficult, difficult, better, fine, fine, tired, tired, fine, good, and then a week where I forgot I was doing it at all.

I found the second month harder than the first because the novelty had worn off and it had turned into something I had to keep doing. That is a very ordinary shape.

What changed for me around week ten was less physical than practical. I finally had a routine that fit my actual week rather than the week I wished I had.

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.

This is the post I wish had existed when I was looking for it.

Bookmarking this. Thank you.

What Obi O described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

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.

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.

Obi O has already said most of this and I want to add the one part that was different for me.

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.

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 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.

Thank you. Genuinely.

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.

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

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.

I would gently say that twelve weeks is not long. It felt endless from inside it and looks very short from here, and both of those readings are honest.