How I explained it to my therapist

Somebody in this circle described it as the volume going down rather than the station changing, and that was the most accurate description I have read.

To the opening post rather than to the thread: Fionnuala, this is my version of it.

Mine returned partially when I reduced, which my prescriber had told me might happen, and knowing in advance made it much less alarming.

I noticed it first in the supermarket, of all places, standing in an aisle that had always been difficult and finding it was simply an aisle.

Reading this at half past six with a cup of tea and nodding at every line.

I keep a note from my first month about what it had been like before, because I could already feel the memory of it fading and I did not want to lose it.

Somebody asked me whether I miss it, which sounds like an absurd question and is not. There was a familiarity to it that I have had to let go of.

I would gently say that if the quiet has left you with a lot of unexpected feeling, that is very common here and it is worth saying out loud.

The relief was enormous and the adjustment was real, and I think people talk about the first and not the second.

The thing that helped was not treating the quiet as the point. It was one change among several and building everything around it made it fragile.

You have described the bit that nobody warns you about.

What I found is that habits built around the noise outlasted the noise. I was still doing things for a reason that no longer applied, months later.

I had never described it to anybody before this circle because I had assumed it was universal. Finding out it was not was a strange afternoon.

My version was gradual rather than sudden. Nothing dramatic, just a slow noticing over about two months that something had stopped.