I am on maintenance and I did not choose it

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.

My prescriber was completely unbothered by mine, which annoyed me at the time and turned out to be the correct response. She said bodies do this and asked me to come back in eight weeks.

The second flat stretch was much easier than the first, purely because I had already survived one and knew the shape of it.

Something that reframed it: a flat stretch is weather, not a verdict. Somebody wrote that here two years ago and I have carried it around ever since.

Mine lasted nineteen weeks. I want to say that plainly because when I was in mine, every account I found described eight and I thought I was broken.

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.

What I say to anybody in one now is that you are still here, still on treatment, still doing the thing. That is the whole of what a flat stretch asks of you.

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.

Mine ended the week I stopped keeping a spreadsheet about it, which is either a profound insight or a coincidence and I genuinely do not know which.

No wisdom, just: I am sorry. That sounds genuinely hard.

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.

Twelve weeks of nothing here too. I remember the exact fortnight when I stopped believing anything would change, and then it did, and I still cannot tell you why.

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 would have written the same thing a year ago, word for word.

Honest experience: mine did not break. It became the level I stayed at, and after about four months I stopped calling it a plateau and started calling it where I live.

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.