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Maintenance

People stopped asking and I found that a relief

Started 26 September 2025 · 19 replies · 164 hearts · read 2.7k times

NilsUppsala, SE · 26 September 2025
10 months ago

Something I have been sitting with: People stopped asking and I found that a relief Not looking for advice so much as other people's experience.

I have been reading here for a few weeks and have not posted, so this is me posting.

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.

Here is where I actually am. The medicine side has been more or less as described; the part nobody prepared me for is everything around it — what to say to people, how to plan a week, and how to tell an ordinary stage from one worth raising.

Sorry for the length. If anybody has been at this point, I would very much like to hear how it went.

55

RuthieLeicester, UK
#1

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.

6

BunnyWeston-super-Mare, UK
#2

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.

7me too 8

BenediktFacilitatorVienna, Austria
#3

I want to name the thing this circle does when somebody says they have stopped: it treats it as ordinary. That is not automatic anywhere else and it is worth saying out loud here.

15

Ozzy GWalsall, UK
#4

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

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.

11

NolanHalifax, CA
#5

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.

7

GittaBonn, DE
#6

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

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.

9

YannickBrussels, BE
#7

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.

4me too 6

TedIpswich, UK
#8

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.

10

TarnKeswick, UK
#9

There is a particular kind of quiet grief in maintenance that took me a long time to name. Something that had been the centre of my attention simply stopped needing it.

7

SinéadCork, IE
#10

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.

9

IzzyWatford, UK
#11

A thing worth saying: my maintenance is not somebody else's. Mine involves a continuing prescription and a yearly review, and there are people here doing something completely different and doing well.

9

IvorLlanelli, UK
#12

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

Maintenance made me much more interested in strength than I ever was earlier on, mostly because it was the one thing still visibly changing.

7

SaoirseKilkenny, IE
#13

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

What surprised me was how much I still wanted a community in maintenance. I had assumed I would drift off once it got easy and instead I turn up more.

10

Gwen DAberystwyth, UK
#14

The best description I have read of this stage was in this circle and it was simply: nothing happened again, and that is the news.

9me too 1

GilTel Aviv, IL
#15

My maintenance has had two wobbles in it, both around big life events, both of which passed. I mention them because a smooth account would be a dishonest one.

8me too 6

TildaCambridge, UK
#16

What I did not anticipate was becoming a person other members ask questions of. I still feel like I am making it up, and apparently that never entirely stops.

7

RunaAarhus, DK
#17

I have stopped tracking almost everything and kept exactly one habit, which is writing two lines on a Sunday. Everything else fell away and nothing bad happened.

10

BenediktFacilitatorVienna, Austria
#18

Stepping in to say that nobody here is behind. There is no schedule this community keeps and nobody is measuring anybody against one.

11

BirdieMargate, UK
#19

I am two years and four months in and my journal entries have got extremely dull, which I now consider the best possible outcome.

8