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Maintenance

Two years and my only news is that there is no news

Started 23 February 2026 · 12 replies · 88 hearts · read 1.9k times

BarnabyWinchester, UK · 23 February 2026
5 months ago

Two years and my only news is that there is no news — putting it in its own thread so it does not get lost in the check-in.

Long one, sorry. I have been chewing on this for a fortnight.

My experience of this stage has not matched any account I have read, which I assume means the accounts are tidier than the reality rather than that something is wrong.

I want to write this down while I am still in it, because I have noticed that I rewrite these stages afterwards into something more sensible than they 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.

The figure in the title is not rhetorical: two years is what my own notes actually say, counted back through them this evening rather than estimated.

Not looking for a plan. Just company, and whatever anybody found at the same stage.

29

GwionBangor, UK
#1

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.

5

RayBarnsley, UK
#2

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.

6me too 2

PamSouthport, UK
#3

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.

10

BenediktFacilitatorVienna, Austria
#4

Adding a note rather than an answer: the guides cover the practical side of this stage well, and the thing this thread is doing that the guides cannot is keeping somebody company.

10

NedChesterfield, UK
#5

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

6

IlseMaastricht, NL
#6

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.

5me too 7

BramwellNottingham, UK
#7

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

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.

9

HettyCambridge, UK
#8

I still come to this circle in maintenance because the newer members ask the questions that keep me honest about what I actually know.

8

HéloïseGeneva, CH
#9

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.

10me too 9

RomyVienna, AT
#10

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.

5

BenediktFacilitatorVienna, Austria
#11

A small housekeeping note. I have added this thread to the circle's standing resources because the question comes round every few months and this is the best version of the answer we have.

9

FreyaReykjavík, IS
#12

Two years in and the only thing I actively do now is a note in my phone once a week and a review once a year. Everything else has become automatic.

5