My gap was six weeks and I still felt like a fraud coming back

Started 8 October 2025 · 16 replies · 148 hearts · read 1.9k times

Gwen DAberystwyth, UK · 8 October 2025

9 months ago

My gap was six weeks and I still felt like a fraud coming back — putting it in its own thread so it does not get lost in the check-in.

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

I have written down what has happened, in order, because I find that more useful than my own summary of it. The summary always sounds either better or worse than the weeks actually were.

What I would find most useful is not advice. It is somebody describing what their version of this stage was, and how long it went on for before it changed.

I have put six weeks in the title because that is the number I keep coming back to, and I would rather be specific than vague about it.

I will report back either way, because other people's follow-ups have helped me more than their questions.

OttilieCheshire, UK

My second time round I set up a buddy from week one instead of week thirty, and it is the single change that made the most difference.

InêsPorto, PT

I found the first fortnight of the restart emotionally heavier than the first fortnight of the original start, which I had not anticipated at all.

12me too 5

BobbieRochdale, UK

Picking up Inês’s point rather than starting a new one.

The gap between deciding to restart and actually doing it was four months for me, almost entirely because I was embarrassed to ask. Please do not lose four months to that.

BenediktFacilitatorVienna, Austria

I am going to close the loop on this one rather than let it drift. Where the person who opened a thread comes back with an update, that is the post I would least want a later reader to miss.

AurelBucharest, RO

The most useful thing anybody said to me was to treat the restart as a new start rather than a resumption, because my body had had a year of its own in between.

11me too 2

ZoraSarajevo, BA

Building on what Bobbie wrote rather than answering the original question.

I want to name that my break happened because life got very hard for a while, and going back happened because it got less hard. That is the entire mechanism.

NikolaiSofia, BG

Nobody in this circle has ever asked me why I stopped in a tone that required an answer. That is the whole reason I was able to come back and say I had.

MableBolton, UK

Practical: I had a proper conversation about starting dose before restarting rather than assuming, and it turned out the assumption I would have made was wrong.

Gwen DAberystwyth, UK

The conversation I dreaded took under five minutes and contained no judgement of any kind. I had spent a month rehearsing for it.

OttilieCheshire, UK

#10

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

If you are hovering, the only thing worth doing is booking the conversation. Everything after that is much smaller than it looks from here.

InêsPorto, PT

#11

Gwen D, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

I came back to the same circle I had left and three people remembered me. That mattered more than I would ever have predicted.

BobbieRochdale, UK

#12

My honest experience is that the restart was better than the original in every respect except that I had lost some ground I would rather have kept.

NerysRhyl, UK

#13

I restarted at a lower step than I stopped at, on purpose, and stayed there for six months. Slowly was the correct speed for a second attempt in my case.

AurelBucharest, RO

#14

A break does not undo what you learned. That was the thing I most needed to hear and the thing I least believed at the time.

8me too 4

BenediktFacilitatorVienna, Austria

#15

Closing note from me: this stays open, it stays linked from the circle landing page, and if you found it late you are still welcome to add to it.

NikolaiSofia, BG

#16

Coming back a year into my restart to say it held, it was ordinary, and the break in the middle is now just a gap in my notes rather than a fault line.