Starting while pacing — how I planned the first month

Started 21 July 2025 · 17 replies · 190 hearts · read 1.7k times

DuncanPerth, UK · 21 July 2025

12 months ago

Starting while pacing — how I planned the first month Writing it down partly to work out what I actually think.

Squeamish subject, so I am going to be plain about it and get it over with.

I am not looking for reassurance particularly. I am looking for somebody to say either that they had exactly this, or that they did not, because both would help.

I want to describe this accurately rather than politely, because the polite version is what I said at my last appointment and it got me nowhere.

No advice needed if you would rather not. Recognition is genuinely enough.

NolCork, IE

The thing I had to learn was to stop before I felt like stopping. Everything I did up to the point of tiredness was borrowed from the next day.

TeganNewport, UK

What I could not tell apart was medication fatigue and my usual fatigue. My notes eventually showed a pattern but it took four months to see.

KikiFacilitatorGlasgow, UK

Thank you all. Somebody arriving embarrassed and being answered without a trace of it is the whole reason this circle is worded the way it is, and it takes everybody to keep it that way.

17me too 4

SolomonManchester, UK

Tegan has already said most of this and I want to add the one part that was different for me.

I had one crash early on that I traced to trying to do a normal week during a step up. I have never made that mistake twice.

PippaTruro, UK

Coming back at two years to say I am considerably better, that it was very slow, and that the slowness is the part I would keep.

BramleyBath, UK

Pacing was the whole thing for me. Everything I have managed in the last two years came from doing less than I could on a good day.

5me too 6

IdaRotterdam, NL

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

My energy budget is a real budget with a real ceiling, and treating it that way rather than as a moral matter changed how I plan every week.

NyreeChristchurch, NZ

The bit in the middle is the bit I needed to read.

BoWhitby, UK

Rest that is actually rest turned out to be a skill I did not have. Lying down with my phone was not rest and it took me a year to notice.

10me too 1

NolanHalifax, CA

#10

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

I had to renegotiate work, which was frightening and turned out to be the single most protective thing I did.

WystanCheltenham, UK

#11

I had to accept a smaller week. Not permanently, as it turns out, but for about a year, and the accepting was harder than the smaller week.

QuinGuildford, UK

#12

My appetite changes and my energy changes interacted in ways that took months to untangle, and eating consistently was what stabilised both.

BevanSwansea, UK

#13

My clinic asked me to change one thing at a time with four weeks between changes, which felt glacial and was completely correct.

14me too 7

TemSouthend, UK

#14

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

Somebody in this circle described a good day as a loan rather than a gift, and I have quoted that to about nine people since.

TallisEly, UK

#15

I keep a very simple three-colour note of each day and the pattern across a month is visible in a way that no single day ever is.

KikiFacilitatorGlasgow, UK

#16

Gently noticing that we have drifted from the symptom that was asked about to a different symptom that two of us have. Let us come back to the person who opened the thread.

SamPortland, OR

#17

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

Mine improved to a genuinely better place over eighteen months and I would not have believed that in month two.