Am I supposed to feel guilty about this

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.

To the opening post rather than to the thread: Tycho, this is my version of it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Holding this with you rather than answering it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

My honest answer to what the first fortnight was like is that it was mostly admin. Working out where things go, when I do it, and who needs to know.