I have the pen in the fridge and I have not touched it for four days

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I would have written the same thing a year ago, word for word.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.