Nobody warned me about being tired

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.