What actually is happening physiologically — the reading group version

I asked at my review whether a long flat stretch meant something was wrong and was told, gently, that bodies are not linear and the assumption that they should be is the odd bit.

Reading back through this circle's older threads was what got me through mine. Dozens of people, all convinced theirs was the permanent one, all still here.

Coming back to what Sable wrote further up, because it is the bit I keep thinking about.

I want to add the unglamorous version: mine was boring rather than distressing. Weeks of nothing, mild irritation, and then it moved. Not every plateau is a crisis.

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

Coming back six months later to close the loop, because I hate threads that stop. Mine lasted seventeen weeks and then quietly ended and I did not notice for a fortnight.

The plateau was not the hard part for me. The hard part was what I started telling myself about the plateau after about week five.

Something I had to unlearn: a plateau is not evidence that I did something wrong. I spent six weeks auditing my own behaviour for a mistake that was not there.

Nkechi — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

What helped was giving the flat stretch a job. I used mine to sort out sleep, which had been quietly terrible for a year and had nothing to do with any of this.

That is a kinder way of putting it than I have managed about myself.

Plateau weeks are the ones where this community is most useful, in my experience. There is nothing to celebrate and nothing to fix, and the only thing that helps is company.

I nearly stopped during mine, and the only reason I did not was that I had promised to come to a circle call on the Thursday and did not want to arrive having quit on the Tuesday.