What to have in the house before you begin

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.

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.

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.

What Tasnim described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

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 have read this twice now. Thank you for writing it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Read, understood, and glad you are here.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.