Therapy alongside this has been the useful part

My prescriber asked directly about mood at every review, which I found intrusive at first and was extremely glad of later.

Something worth knowing: my appetite change and my mood change moved together and it took a long time to work out which was leading.

I had a difficult autumn that had nothing to do with any of this, and disentangling that was most of the work of my second year.

The routine came apart first for me and the mood followed, and my therapist thought that order was informative rather than incidental.

I told my GP later than I should have. Please do not do what I did. The conversation was much easier than the four months of not having it.

Flat rather than sad was the closest I could get to describing mine, and it took me two months to find a clinician who understood that distinction.

Coming back to say I am better. It took two clinicians, one medication review and a very patient friend, and it took about eight months.

What helped was telling one person honestly rather than four people partially. The partial versions were exhausting and got me nothing.

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

Mine improved over about five months, alongside sleep improving, and I genuinely cannot separate the two.

The thing that helped least was being told it was probably the medication, before anybody had looked at anything else in my life.

I would have written the same thing a year ago, word for word.

What I did not expect was how much of my mood had been tied to a constant background effort, and how odd it felt when that effort stopped.