Second week and the nausea arrived on schedule

Started 4 March 2024 · 23 replies · 281 hearts · read 5.7k times

DelphiThessaloniki, GR · 4 March 2024

2.4 years ago

Starting a thread on this because it keeps coming up in ones and twos: Second week and the nausea arrived on schedule

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.

My honest position is that I do not know whether to change something or wait, and I have been going round that question for three weeks without getting anywhere.

No rush on replies. I am not going anywhere and neither, apparently, is this stage.

CormacWaterford, IE

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.

PerduMontpellier, FR

Delphi, answering your question directly rather than going round the houses.

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.

14me too 7

EsiFacilitatorToronto, Canada

A reminder that this circle holds every stage at once, which is its strength and occasionally its difficulty. Somebody in year three answering somebody in week three needs to say which they are.

OllieCardiff, UK

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.

SaskiaThe Hague, NL

Coming back to what Esi wrote further up, because it is the bit I keep thinking about.

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.

13me too 4

TorinBelfast, NI

Holding this with you rather than answering it.

OsipTbilisi, GE

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.

SephNorwich, UK

Torin, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

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.

BodhiByron Bay, AU

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

TasnimBradford, UK

#10

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.

SerenLlandudno, UK

#11

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.

CarlMiddlesbrough, UK

#12

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.

TychoLeiden, NL

#13

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.

DelphiThessaloniki, GR

#14

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

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

#15

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.

PerduMontpellier, FR

#16

Coming back to what Delphi wrote further up, because it is the bit I keep thinking about.

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.

15me too 1

TommieEly, UK

#17

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

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.

OllieCardiff, 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.

SaskiaThe Hague, NL

#19

Tommie, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

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.

14me too 3

TorinBelfast, NI

#20

That is a very clear way of putting something I have never been able to put clearly.

OsipTbilisi, GE

#21

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

EsiFacilitatorToronto, Canada

#22

Noticing out loud that we have drifted into comparing timelines. That happens without anybody intending it and it does not help the person who opened the thread. Let us come back to them.

BodhiByron Bay, AU

#23

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

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.

11me too 7