What I would do differently if I started again

Do not compare your week seven to somebody else's week seven. I did that for about a month and it cost me a fortnight of unnecessary worry.

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.

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.

Thank you for the update. Threads that stop are the worst kind.

I asked here in week five whether I should be further along, and somebody replied asking further along than what. I did not have an answer, and that was the answer.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

No advice, only that you are not the only one who found this part hard.

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.