I am starting at 62 and I feel late to everything

Started 3 April 2025 · 22 replies · 214 hearts · read 2k times

CormacWaterford, IE · 3 April 2025

1.3 years ago

I am starting at 62 and I feel late to everything — putting it in its own thread so it does not get lost in the check-in.

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.

I have a review coming up and I would like to arrive with a proper account of this stage rather than the vague description I gave last time.

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

SerenLlandudno, UK

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.

EsiFacilitatorToronto, Canada

I am pleased with how this went and I want to say so. Not every thread needs a facilitator and this one mostly did not.

SephNorwich, UK

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.

8me too 8

TommieEly, UK

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

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.

SaskiaThe Hague, NL

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.

OllieCardiff, UK

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.

11me too 1

PerduMontpellier, FR

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

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.

CarlMiddlesbrough, UK

Reading and nodding. Nothing to add, and I wanted you to know somebody had read it.

DelphiThessaloniki, GR

Read, understood, and glad you are here.

TorinBelfast, NI

#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.

TychoLeiden, NL

#11

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.

13me too 1

OsipTbilisi, GE

#12

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.

BodhiByron Bay, AU

#13

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.

CormacWaterford, IE

#14

Nothing to add except that I am glad this thread exists.

SerenLlandudno, UK

#15

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

#16

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

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.

SephNorwich, UK

#17

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

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.

TommieEly, UK

#18

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.

9me too 5

SaskiaThe Hague, NL

#19

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

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.

OllieCardiff, UK

#20

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.

EsiFacilitatorToronto, Canada

#21

If anybody is wondering whether this was a silly thing to ask: it was not. It is the question that opens this circle every few months and it has never once been treated as small.

CarlMiddlesbrough, UK

#22

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.