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Maintenance

Maintenance is the least interesting thing that has ever happened to me

Started 4 June 2025 · 8 replies · 323 hearts · read 2.5k times

MattNottingham, UK · 4 June 2025
about a year ago

Eighteen months steady, Nottingham, and I want to write the post that nobody clicks on.

Here is my week. Wednesday evening, after the news, I do the injection at the kitchen table while the kettle boils. It takes under a minute. I put the pen back in the fridge behind the milk. I write a W in the little square on the calendar because once, in a bad month, I lost track and had a very stupid week.

That is it. That is the whole of it. There is no arc. Nothing has changed in either direction since roughly last February. My clothes are the same clothes. My bloods were fine in March and will presumably be fine in September. I go swimming on Sundays because I like it, not because it is a programme.

And I want to say clearly, because I do not think anybody said it to me when I needed it: this is the good bit. Not the anticlimax after the good bit. The actual thing. Twelve years of my adult life were spent in a cycle of starting something, doing it intensely, and then abandoning it in a heap in about the third week of March, and the constant feature of all of it was that something was always happening. Everything was a project. Everything had a beginning and a crisis.

Nothing is happening now. It took me about six months to stop being uneasy about that, because a life where nothing is happening felt, at first, like a life where I had stopped trying. It is not. It is what trying looks like when it has worked and gone quiet.

If you are in the loud part and reading this: the boring bit is available and it is much better than it sounds.

108

BenediktFacilitatorVienna, Austria
#1

Matt, this is the post I would put on the front of the circle if we had a front.

The internet stops writing at week twelve. Everything you can find is about the beginning — the first pen, the first fortnight, the early change — and then the writing simply stops, and the actual majority of a person’s time on this happens in the silence afterwards with no map at all.

What you have described is the map. A minute at the kitchen table, a letter on a calendar, and nothing happening. People arrive in this circle braced for a new challenge and the honest news is that there mostly is not one, and that the adjustment is psychological rather than practical: learning to stop measuring your life in change when the change is the thing you were trying to end.

54me too 11

RomyVienna, AT
#2

Vienna. Maintenance is my favourite word and I chose it deliberately when I signed up, because I wanted to be the person in the room saying the dull thing.

The uneasy stretch you describe was six weeks for me and it was genuinely disorienting. I had built a lot of identity out of being someone in the middle of something. When that went I had to find out what I actually liked doing, which at forty-one was a slightly humbling exercise.

38me too 9

OttilieCheshire, UK
#3

Quietly maintaining since spring. The W in the square. I do a small dot, and once a month I look at the row of dots and feel a completely disproportionate satisfaction.

Nobody in my life knows the dots exist. They are the most private good thing I have.

42me too 6

HannahSheffield, UK
#4

Three months in and learning to ask for help before I am desperate, and I need to say that reading this made me cry a bit in a good way.

I did not know boring was on offer. Everything I have read since January has been either a warning or a triumph. A minute at the kitchen table while the kettle boils is the first thing anybody has described that I actually want.

49me too 14

MorayElgin, UK
#5

Whisky country, alcohol circle regular. The bit that landed for me was the March heap. I have abandoned everything in the third week of March for twenty years — gym, running, a language, twice a boat.

What is different this time is that there is nothing to abandon. There is no intensity to run out of. I had not understood that the absence of a crisis is the whole mechanism.

45me too 10

IdaRotterdam, NL
#6

Married to another member, we check in together, and we are both in the quiet part now. Our version of your calendar is a magnet on the fridge that gets moved from one side to the other.

It is deeply unromantic and it is the most stable either of us has been about any of this in a decade.

31me too 5

JunoBrighton, UK
#7

Sceptical, anxious, staying anyway, and I have a question for the maintenance people since you are all in here being so calm about it.

Does the quiet ever start to feel precarious? As in, do you spend any of it waiting for it to be taken away, in a way that spoils the having of it? Because that is the bit I cannot picture from here — I can imagine nothing happening, and I cannot imagine trusting that nothing was going to happen.

24me too 8

MattNottingham, UK
#8

Juno, honest answer: for the first half year, constantly. I had a background hum of waiting for it to stop working, and any ordinary hungry Tuesday would set it off.

It faded. Not because I decided anything, just through repetition. Eighteen months of unremarkable Wednesdays is quite persuasive. I would not pretend the hum is gone entirely — supply worries me more than my body does now, which tells you something about where I have got to.

40me too 7

Facilitator note — Benedikt

Facilitator note — Benedikt. I hold maintenance and I want to underline the thing Matt did here, because it is unfashionable.

He wrote about a period in which nothing occurred, at length, on purpose. That is the hardest kind of post to write and almost nobody writes it, which is exactly why people arriving at month eighteen feel they have fallen off the end of the story. There is no story. There is a Wednesday, and then another one.

One caveat I will always add in this circle: steady is not the same as fixed, and a quiet year is a good time to keep your reviews and your bloods rather than let them slide because nothing is wrong. Nothing being wrong is worth confirming occasionally.