How do you tell whether this is normal or a problem

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 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.

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.

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 have nothing to add and I did not want to leave it unanswered.

Recognition rather than advice, if that is any use at all.

What I remember most from the first two weeks was how much room it took up in my head. That does fade. It is now something that happens on a Wednesday and I think about it for four minutes.

Adding a name to the list of people this helped.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tycho said something I want to sit with for a second.

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.

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.

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.