The pharmacist queried it and I did not know what to say

Whenever somebody new arrives worried about being slow, I say the same thing: nobody in this circle is going to be impressed by speed, and nobody is keeping score.

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

My prescriber and I settled on longer gaps between steps and shorter gaps between conversations, which I would recommend to anybody who finds the schedule stressful.

Slow titration is not the cautious version of this. For some of us it is simply the version that works, and I have stopped framing it as a hedge.

Well said, and thank you for taking the time over it.

I stayed where I was for four months because it suited me there, and the only pressure to move came from me. Not from my prescriber, and certainly not from anybody here.

Somebody in this circle described their pace as "geological" and I have thought about that phrase very fondly ever since. Mine is similar and nobody minds.

I found I needed about three weeks at each step before I knew what that step was like. Two weeks always gave me a half-formed impression that I then acted on.

My prescriber described the aim as staying on treatment comfortably rather than reaching a particular step, and once I heard it that way the pressure evaporated.

What I found hardest was other people's timelines, not my own. Once I stopped reading week-by-week accounts elsewhere, my own pace stopped feeling like a deficiency.

I hold at a step for as long as it is still teaching me something. When a step gets boring, that is usually my sign to talk about the next one.

Nine months at one step here and my prescriber has never once suggested moving. She said the schedule is a scaffold and I am not obliged to climb it.