The strange grief of not having a project any more

Started 14 March 2026 · 15 replies · 107 hearts · read 1.4k times

AikoOsaka, JP · 14 March 2026

4 months ago

Something I have been sitting with: The strange grief of not having a project any more Not looking for advice so much as other people's experience.

I do not know if this belongs in this circle. Move me if not.

I have been reading this circle for months and everybody else's account of this stage sounds much tidier than mine, which is either reassuring or the wrong conclusion entirely.

I nearly did not post this because it feels like a small thing to be stuck on. It has taken up most of my thinking for a month, so apparently it is not small to me.

I will report back either way, because other people's follow-ups have helped me more than their questions.

TemSouthend, UK

What I did not expect was how much of maintenance is about other people forgetting. The interest fades and you are left doing the same thing quietly, which is fine, and is also lonely sometimes.

BenediktFacilitatorVienna, Austria

Adding a marker so the thread does not lose it: when the same practical thing gets named twice by two people who have never met, that is usually the sentence a newcomer needs, and it is rarely the one at the top.

13me too 1

GwynethAberdare, UK

Reading and nodding. Nothing to add, and I wanted you to know somebody had read it.

RunaAarhus, DK

Building on what Gwyneth wrote rather than answering the original question.

The practical shape of my maintenance is: one review a year, one set of bloods, one conversation about whether anything has changed. That is genuinely all of it now.

GwilymCaernarfon, UK

The conversation I found hardest in maintenance was about how long. My prescriber's answer was that we would keep reviewing it, which is honest and was not what I wanted.

BertieHarrogate, UK

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

I reduced, held, and then reduced again eight months later, both times slowly and both times after a proper conversation. Neither move was dramatic and both were fine.

LilPreston, UK

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

Something that helped: I decided to keep journalling weekly in maintenance even when there was nothing to say. Those entries are how I noticed a slow change I would otherwise have missed.

OllyReading, UK

My honest account of maintenance is that it took about four months to stop bracing. I kept waiting for something to go wrong and nothing did, and eventually I put the brace down.

NedChesterfield, UK

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

Maintenance is where the non-scale things came into their own for me. All the things I noticed in year one turned out to be the things that stayed.

7me too 1

OrrinGlasgow, UK

#10

I would say to anybody approaching this stage: decide what you want your ordinary week to look like, because nothing is going to arrange it for you once the novelty ends.

MarkCoventry, UK

#11

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

Nobody prepared me for the strange flatness of it. Not sadness. Just the absence of a project, after two years of having one.

DevManchester, UK

#12

Maintenance is where I finally had to deal with things the earlier stages had let me postpone. That was harder than any of the physical adjustment.

6me too 5

BessLouth, UK

#13

My prescriber reduced me and we have held there for fourteen months. It has been the most uneventful fourteen months of my adult life and I am not complaining.

BenediktFacilitatorVienna, Austria

#14

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.

IvorLlanelli, UK

#15

I have been in maintenance long enough to have had two dull years and one difficult one. The difficult one had nothing to do with the medication and everything to do with my life.

8me too 9