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Restarting after a break

I kept my journal through the gap and it helped enormously

Started 10 May 2025 · 22 replies · 219 hearts · read 2.6k times

ZoraSarajevo, BA · 10 May 2025
about a year ago

Starting a thread on this because it keeps coming up in ones and twos: I kept my journal through the gap and it helped enormously

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

I nearly did not post this because it feels like a small thing to be stuck on. It has taken up most of my thinking for a month, so apparently it is not small to me.

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.

No rush on replies. I am not going anywhere and neither, apparently, is this stage.

73

OttilieCheshire, UK
#1

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.

12me too 8

Gwen DAberystwyth, UK
#2

Zora, I have been where you are and I would rather say so than stay quiet.

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.

7

MableBolton, UK
#3

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.

9

BenediktFacilitatorVienna, Austria
#4

Gently: you have apologised three times in a post where you have done nothing that requires an apology. This circle does not need you to be further along than you are.

15

InêsPorto, PT
#5

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.

11

BobbieRochdale, UK
#6

Reading this at half past six with a cup of tea and nodding at every line.

13me too 2

NerysRhyl, UK
#7

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

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.

9

NikolaiSofia, BG
#8

What worked was making the restart small and boring. One conversation, one step, one week at a time, no plan beyond the next fortnight.

11

ZoraSarajevo, BA
#9

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

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.

8

OttilieCheshire, UK
#10

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

10

Gwen DAberystwyth, UK
#11

My break was nine months and my restart was uneventful, which is the least dramatic sentence in this thread and the one I most wanted to read when I was deciding.

10

MableBolton, UK
#12

Agreed, and I have nothing to add to it.

13me too 3

AurelBucharest, RO
#13

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

I kept everything from the first time and it made the restart conversation extremely short. The notes were worth more than I would have guessed.

12

InêsPorto, PT
#14

Something worth knowing: my second start had different side effects from my first. Not worse, different. I had expected an exact repeat and got a variation.

6

BobbieRochdale, UK
#15

My prescriber's first sentence when I asked about going back was that plenty of people do, which deflated about six weeks of dread in one go.

6

NerysRhyl, UK
#16

Restarting is an ordinary shape. I did not believe that when I was doing it and I believe it completely now, having watched about thirty people here do the same.

10

NikolaiSofia, BG
#17

I started again from the bottom step, deliberately, even though I had been much further along before. It was the right call and my prescriber agreed without me having to argue.

7

ZoraSarajevo, BA
#18

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

The shame was the worst of it for me, and the shame was also the least justified part. Nothing about a break requires an apology.

12

OttilieCheshire, UK
#19

Read, understood, and glad you are here.

6

Gwen DAberystwyth, UK
#20

What surprised me was how quickly the routine came back. Muscle memory for where things go, when I do it, what the week looks like. Three days and I was back in it.

9

BenediktFacilitatorVienna, Austria
#21

A reminder that this circle holds every stage at once, which is its strength and occasionally its difficulty. Somebody in year three answering somebody in week three needs to say which they are.

11

AurelBucharest, RO
#22

You have said something a lot of us have not managed to. Thank you.

12