What a reduced maintenance dose has been like

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.

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.

I have nothing to add and I did not want to leave it unanswered.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Not a solution, just company.

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.