What questions did you take to your first follow-up

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.

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.

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.

I did not tell anybody for the first month. I do not regret that and I would not recommend it either. It was simply what I could manage at the time.

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.

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.

I read this twice. The second time was for the last paragraph.

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.

You have not done it wrong. The first fortnight is genuinely a lot of new information arriving at once, and none of the guides can arrange it into a week that looks like your week.

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.