I have read too much and now I am frightened of everything

Started 24 February 2026 · 17 replies · 117 hearts · read 1.3k times

SaskiaThe Hague, NL · 24 February 2026

5 months ago

Something I have been sitting with: I have read too much and now I am frightened of everything Not looking for advice so much as other people's experience.

I do not know if this belongs in this circle. Move me if not.

Here is where I actually am. The medicine side has been more or less as described; the part nobody prepared me for is everything around it — what to say to people, how to plan a week, and how to tell an ordinary stage from one worth raising.

My experience of this stage has not matched any account I have read, which I assume means the accounts are tidier than the reality rather than that something is wrong.

Sorry for the length. If anybody has been at this point, I would very much like to hear how it went.

SephNorwich, UK

A thing I wish somebody had told me: you can ask your pharmacist all of the boring questions without booking anything. Mine spent ten minutes with me at the counter and answered four things I had been too embarrassed to ask.

4me too 7

PerduMontpellier, FR

My prescriber gave me one sentence at the start that I have repeated to about nine people since: if something worries you enough to search for it at midnight, it is worth a call in the morning.

EsiFacilitatorToronto, Canada

Something worth noticing whenever it happens in a thread like this: somebody puts down the difficult version rather than the tidy one, and nobody flinches. That is not automatic and it is most of what we are for.

SerenLlandudno, UK

Esi said something I want to sit with for a second.

I would say give yourself permission to be bad at this for a while. I was bad at it for about six weeks and then it became something I did without thinking.

OsipTbilisi, GE

I came into this circle on day three and did not post for a month. Reading was enough at the time. If that is where you are, that is a perfectly good place to be.

CormacWaterford, IE

Picking up Osip’s point rather than starting a new one.

My first fortnight had one genuinely rough afternoon in it and the rest was uneventful. I mention the rough afternoon because if I only tell you about the uneventful part it will not help you when you get one.

8me too 2

OllieCardiff, UK

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

Mine started on a Sunday because I wanted a quiet day after, and I still do it on Sundays two years later. There is no correct day, only the one you can keep.

DelphiThessaloniki, GR

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

TychoLeiden, NL

The bit that surprised me was how much I wanted to talk to somebody who was two weeks ahead rather than two years ahead. That is what this circle is actually for.

BodhiByron Bay, AU

#10

Reading Ollie, I recognised more of that than I expected to.

I found the waiting harder than anything else in the first fortnight. Waiting to see whether I would feel something, waiting to see whether it was working. The waiting was the whole of my first two weeks.

TasnimBradford, UK

#11

The one thing I would say to somebody in their first fortnight is to write down what actually happens, in two lines, even when nothing does. My own notes from that period are the only reason I can answer questions about myself now.

TorinBelfast, NI

#12

Tycho — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

Mine started with two very quiet days and then a slightly odd third day, and I had convinced myself by then that something had gone wrong. It had not. It was just the third day.

CarlMiddlesbrough, UK

#13

Whatever you are feeling in week one, somebody in this circle has written it down already. That was the thing that helped me most — not the answers, the fact that the questions were ordinary.

SaskiaThe Hague, NL

#14

This is the honest version, and the honest version is harder to write.

SephNorwich, UK

#15

Something that steadied me: my prescriber said the first weeks are for finding out how you respond, not for making progress. I had assumed the opposite and it made the whole thing feel like an exam.

EsiFacilitatorToronto, Canada

#16

Gently: you have apologised three times in a post where you have done nothing that requires an apology. This circle does not need you to be further along than you are.

TommieEly, UK

#17

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

Ordinary early things nobody had mentioned to me: I was much more tired at four in the afternoon, I noticed water tasted different, and I forgot to eat lunch twice in the first week and then felt awful.