Do you still journal in maintenance

Started 29 July 2025 · 20 replies · 189 hearts · read 2.3k times

FabianBasel, CH · 29 July 2025

12 months ago

Do you still journal in maintenance — putting it in its own thread so it does not get lost in the check-in.

Writing this partly to ask and partly because writing it down usually tells me what I think.

What I keep tripping on is not knowing whether where I am is where I should be at this point, and having nobody to ask who is not either selling something or worried about me.

I am aware some of this may simply be what this stage is like. I would still like to hear from people who have been through it, because I have spent a fortnight assuming I am the only one.

The thing that has surprised me most about this stage is how much of it is about other people rather than about me.

Anyway. Thank you for reading this far. Any experience of this stage gratefully received, and I will come back and say what happened.

NilsUppsala, SE

Honest answer to how long I plan to be here: I do not know, and my prescriber does not either, and we have agreed to keep looking at it rather than pretending otherwise.

WellsChester, UK

I keep one line from my first year pinned in my notes, and I reread it whenever maintenance feels like nothing. It reminds me what nothing used to cost.

BenediktFacilitatorVienna, Austria

Two things, both boring. None of us can tell you what schedule to be on. The conversation you want is with your prescriber, and we can help you write it down before you go.

NualaArmagh, NI

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.

8me too 6

OttaviaBologna, IT

Thank you for writing this down. It helped.

TychoLeiden, NL

The thing that caught me out about maintenance was the absence of a finish line. I had built the whole thing around arriving somewhere and then arrived and found there was nothing to do.

MaudGhent, BE

Year two is the part nobody writes about, and I think that is because it is not a story. It is Wednesdays. Very good Wednesdays, but Wednesdays.

11me too 1

PipBristol, UK

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

Coming back to this thread a year on to say that the dullness held. Nothing to report, which is the report.

Bryn MNeath, UK

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

BarnabyWinchester, UK

#10

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

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.

7me too 5

TorinBelfast, NI

#11

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.

6me too 5

LinneaTurku, FI

#12

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

DevManchester, UK

#13

What changed in maintenance for me was the questions. They stopped being about symptoms and started being about how long, and what happens next, and nobody has a very good answer to either.

PerdyShrewsbury, UK

#14

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

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.

MoBradford, UK

#15

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

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

RomyVienna, AT

#16

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.

12me too 3

PrueChester, UK

#17

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.

LeniLeipzig, DE

#18

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.

BenediktFacilitatorVienna, Austria

#19

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.

WilfStoke, UK

#20

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.