A peer support community, independent and not for sale. Since February 2024.

GLP CircleA peer support community

Just starting

Nobody warned me the first week would be so boring

Started 3 October 2025 · 7 replies · 174 hearts · read 3k times

OsricSalisbury, UK · 3 October 2025
10 months ago

Plain speaker, so here it is plainly. I had braced for a fortnight of misery. I read the leaflet twice, told my wife where the bucket was, took the Friday off work, and cancelled a lunch.

Nothing happened.

Slight headache on the Saturday which may well have been the two coffees I did not need. Went off toast for a bit on the Sunday. That is the entire report. I spent the whole week waiting for the thing to arrive and it did not arrive, and by Thursday I had started to wonder whether it was working at all, which I recognise is an absurd thing to be disappointed about.

What I actually want to say is that I could not find a single account of a boring first week anywhere online before I started. Everything I read was either a disaster or a miracle. So this is me putting a boring one on the record, in case somebody else is sitting there on the Thursday of week one feeling oddly cheated.

Second thing, more of a question. Does the quiet first week mean anything? I have decided it does not mean anything and I would like somebody to tell me I am right, or that I am wrong, either is fine.

58

TomásFacilitatorLisbon, Portugal
#1

You are right that it does not tell you much, and I would go further: a quiet start and a rough start both happen, and neither predicts what week nine looks like. I have watched people conclude enormous things from their first fortnight in both directions and be wrong.

The reason the internet is full of disasters and miracles is that nobody sits down to write about a Tuesday when nothing occurred. Thank you for writing about the Tuesday when nothing occurred. It genuinely helps the person reading at 2am.

41me too 7

TedIpswich, UK
#2

Boring first week here too. I had bought three kinds of ginger biscuit, ready-salted crisps, and a bag of those little tinned rice puddings. Ate none of it. My son had the crisps.

The odd thing was the anticlimax. I had psyched myself up as if for a fight and then the fight did not turn up and I had all that adrenaline and nowhere to put it.

18me too 5

GwenBangor, UK
#3

Welsh, stubborn, and I did the same as you with the bucket. Mine came later — week five, after a step, and it was manageable rather than dramatic.

So the boring week did not lie to me exactly. It just was not a forecast.

12me too 3

NixLeith, UK
#4

Different angle. My first week was quiet and I found the quiet hard, because I had built an enormous amount of routine and preparation around a thing that then did not need any of it. Routine is how I hold my life together and I had over-built.

Took me a fortnight to let the scaffolding down. If anyone else is neurodivergent and reading this with recognition, that is a thing and it passes.

29me too 9

RayBarnsley, UK
#5

I complain about everything and I have nothing to complain about here, which is its own small annoyance.

Osric, keep a couple of lines a week somewhere. Not a project. Two lines. Mine is the reason I know that my flat patches always land on the third day after a step and always lift, and that knowledge is worth more than the entire first month of reading I did.

23me too 4

LarkGalway, IE
#6

The cancelled lunch made me laugh, in the fondest way. I cancelled a christening. Sat at home entirely well, watching photographs of it arrive on my phone.

You have not wasted the caution though. Better to have the Friday off and not need it.

17me too 2

OsricSalisbury, UK
#7

Two lines a week, understood. Started it.

And I have made my peace with the anticlimax. My wife pointed out that I do this with hurricanes as well — batten everything down, then feel personally slighted when the weather passes to the north.

34me too 3