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Is it meant to feel like this or have I done it wrong

Started 16 August 2025 · 20 replies · 160 hearts · read 2.8k times

OsipTbilisi, GE · 16 August 2025
11 months ago

Is it meant to feel like this or have I done it wrong Writing it down partly to work out what I actually think.

I have been reading here for a few weeks and have not posted, so this is me posting.

I have written down what has happened, in order, because I find that more useful than my own summary of it. The summary always sounds either better or worse than the weeks actually were.

What I am trying to work out is whether this is a phase with an end to it or the shape of things now, and I do not think I can tell that from inside it.

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

53

TasnimBradford, UK
#1

You are allowed to find the first two weeks confusing. I read four guides and still stood in my kitchen holding the box like it was going to explain itself.

4

EsiFacilitatorToronto, Canada
#2

Adding a note rather than an answer: the guides cover the practical side of this stage well, and the thing this thread is doing that the guides cannot is keeping somebody company.

19

PerduMontpellier, FR
#3

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

Please do ask the silly questions here. I asked one about storage in my first week that I was mortified by, and four people answered it kindly, and two of them said they had wondered the same thing.

6me too 1

CarlMiddlesbrough, UK
#4

The first fortnight is also when everybody else is at their most curious, which nobody warns you about. You do not owe anybody an explanation, including people who ask kindly.

7

TorinBelfast, NI
#5

Two small practical things from my first fortnight. I put a note in my phone for the same evening each week, and I kept everything in one drawer so I never had to go looking.

8

TommieEly, UK
#6

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

If you are frightened, that is not a bad sign. Half this circle was frightened. Several of us still are, mildly, and get on with it anyway.

9me too 3

SephNorwich, UK
#7

I remember reading a thread like this before I started and thinking everybody sounded much calmer than me. Two years on I can tell you that most of them were not calm either. They were just further along.

6

SaskiaThe Hague, NL
#8

Nothing dramatic happened to me in the first two weeks, which I found unsettling, because the internet had led me to expect either a miracle or a disaster. It was neither. It was Tuesday.

8

DelphiThessaloniki, GR
#9

Somebody here told me early on to stop trying to predict how the next week would go, and it was the single most useful thing I was given. I was spending more energy forecasting than living.

9

SerenLlandudno, UK
#10

You will read a lot of very confident accounts of the first fortnight. Mine was not confident. It was fine, and it was not confident, and both of those were true at once.

5

OllieCardiff, UK
#11

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

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.

4

CormacWaterford, IE
#12

Nothing about my first fortnight was interesting enough to write down at the time, and I now wish I had written it down anyway. It is the period you remember least clearly and get asked about most.

8me too 3

TychoLeiden, NL
#13

Coming back to say that my first fortnight felt enormous at the time and is now a paragraph. That is not a dismissal of how it feels. It is a promise about how it looks later.

6

OsipTbilisi, GE
#14

The kindest thing I did for myself in the first two weeks was to lower what I expected from those two weeks. I stopped asking them to be a beginning of anything and just let them be two weeks.

10

TasnimBradford, UK
#15

The first fortnight was the strangest part for me. Nothing had settled into a rhythm yet and I kept waiting to feel like a person who does this, which took about two months longer than I expected.

8me too 7

BodhiByron Bay, AU
#16

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.

8

PerduMontpellier, FR
#17

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

7

CarlMiddlesbrough, UK
#18

Gently disagreeing with Bodhi, or rather adding the other half of it.

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.

5

EsiFacilitatorToronto, Canada
#19

I am going to close the loop on this one rather than let it drift. Where the person who opened a thread comes back with an update, that is the post I would least want a later reader to miss.

16

TommieEly, UK
#20

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

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.

7