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Restarting after a break

Third time. Genuinely third time

Started 30 December 2024 · 18 replies · 220 hearts · read 3.8k times

InêsPorto, PT · 30 December 2024
1.6 years ago

Third time. Genuinely third time — putting it in its own thread so it does not get lost in the check-in.

Writing this partly to ask and partly because writing it down usually tells me what I think.

My honest position is that I do not know whether to change something or wait, and I have been going round that question for three weeks without getting anywhere.

Here is where I actually am. The medicine side has been more or less as described; the part nobody prepared me for is everything around it — what to say to people, how to plan a week, and how to tell an ordinary stage from one worth raising.

The thing that has surprised me most about this stage is how much of it is about other people rather than about me.

Anyway. Thank you for reading this far. Any experience of this stage gratefully received, and I will come back and say what happened.

73

Gwen DAberystwyth, UK
#1

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.

12

NerysRhyl, UK
#2

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.

16

BenediktFacilitatorVienna, Austria
#3

Stepping in to say that nobody here is behind. There is no schedule this community keeps and nobody is measuring anybody against one.

21

NikolaiSofia, BG
#4

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

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.

8me too 5

BobbieRochdale, UK
#5

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

8

MableBolton, UK
#6

Read, understood, and glad you are here.

13

ZoraSarajevo, BA
#7

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

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.

9me too 9

AurelBucharest, RO
#8

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.

14

InêsPorto, PT
#9

The thing I would say is that a break is information. Mine told me a great deal about which changes had been the medication and which had become mine.

11me too 1

Gwen DAberystwyth, UK
#10

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

Restarting after a cost break here. The situation changed, I went back, and nobody at the surgery treated it as anything other than routine.

10

NerysRhyl, UK
#11

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 8

OttilieCheshire, UK
#12

Reading Gwen D, I recognised more of that than I expected to.

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.

16

NikolaiSofia, BG
#13

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

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

12

BobbieRochdale, UK
#14

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

12

MableBolton, UK
#15

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.

14

ZoraSarajevo, BA
#16

I restarted after fourteen months and the hardest part was entirely in my head. The practical side took one appointment and a fortnight.

5me too 2

BenediktFacilitatorVienna, Austria
#17

Something worth noticing whenever it happens in a thread like this: somebody puts down the difficult version rather than the tidy one, and nobody flinches. That is not automatic and it is most of what we are for.

25

InêsPorto, PT
#18

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

6