Maintenance is boring and I mean that as praise

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

That is a very clear way of putting something I have never been able to put clearly.

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.

Just marking that I read this properly rather than skimming it.

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.

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.