Eight months away. I have written this post four times

Started 9 December 2025 · 8 replies · 369 hearts · read 4.7k times

IzzyWatford, UK · 9 December 2025

7 months ago

Watford. Between doses, between jobs, between plans, which I wrote in a jokey way in 2024 and which has turned out to be an accurate description of an entire year.

I stopped in March. Money, mostly, and a job ending, and then honestly a stretch where I could not organise anything at all. I did not tell anybody here. I deleted the app off my phone on a Sunday because seeing everyone else’s Thursdays felt unbearable, and then eight months went past.

I am restarting on Friday. Prescription in hand, prescriber who knows the whole history, all of it above board.

And I have written this post four times because every version of it sounded like an apology. I keep wanting to explain myself to you. I have a whole paragraph drafted about why the eight months happened that reads like a note to a headmaster. I have deleted it twice.

What I am actually braced for is somebody saying welcome back in a tone. You know the tone. The one that means we noticed you went. Or worse, somebody asking, kindly, what I have learned, as though eight months of a difficult year were a course I was on.

So I am posting it plainly. I stopped, I went away, I am starting again on Friday, and I am frightened of the first injection in a way I was not the first time round, because the first time I did not know what I was signing up for and now I do.

123

BenediktFacilitatorVienna, Austria

Izzy. Welcome back, and I am going to try very hard to say it in no tone at all.

Nobody here is owed the paragraph. You were gone, you are here, that is the entire administrative content of it. This circle exists because what you have just described kept happening to people and nobody had a name for it or a room for it, and members were carrying around an extraordinary quantity of shame about a completely ordinary shape: start, stop, gap, start again.

On the second injection-that-is-really-the-first being harder — that is very common and worth saying out loud. The first time you were frightened of the unknown. This time you are frightened of the known, which is a more specific and more reasonable fear. It is also usually a milder experience than people expect, because you know what the fortnight after looks like and you can plan around it.

Friday. We will be about.

58me too 13

SaraOslo, NO

Seven months off, restarted, and I recognise the four drafts because I did the same thing and mine also read like a note to a headmaster.

The thing nobody told me, so I will tell you: the restart was not a repeat. Same medicine, different person. I knew what to do with the first fortnight. I did not panic about day three. It was in every way easier and I had spent months dreading it as though it would be the first time again with extra shame on top.

51me too 10

EsiFacilitatorToronto, Canada

Adding mine to the pile, since I ask people to be honest and should be too: I stopped at nine weeks in 2023 and restarted six months later, and I facilitate the new-members circle. Nobody has ever held it against me. Several people have said it was the reason they trusted me.

Izzy, if you would like somebody on a call on Friday for the injection itself, say the word. Not because you cannot do it — because doing it with a bit of company is nicer.

47me too 8

StefanZurich, CH

Twice, me. Once by choice, for four months, and once for six weeks because Zurich simply ran out and nobody could tell me when it would be back.

The second restart I did not tell anybody about either — not this room, not my brother, nobody — and I have come to think that was the only genuine mistake in the whole sequence. The gaps were fine. The silence around them cost me a winter.

33me too 9

KezWigan, UK

Shift work, two jobs, one very tired woman. Four months off last year and I never posted about it, so consider this me finally doing it in somebody else’s thread.

The tone you are braced for does exist, Izzy, but not in here. It lives in family kitchens.

41me too 12

ZoëHackney, UK

You are the person who told me not to leave the room in October and I did not, and it is the reason my winter has been about forty per cent less grim than the last one.

So: no tone. Absolutely no tone. Friday.

44me too 6

NadiaCairo, EG

Expat pharmacy roulette, so my gaps are involuntary and frequent — three of them last year, the longest eleven weeks. What I have learned, since you mentioned dreading being asked: nothing. I learned nothing. The gaps were administrative and I survived them and there is no lesson in it.

You are allowed to have had eight months that were not a curriculum.

49me too 11

IzzyWatford, UK

Not a curriculum. Right. That is the sentence I needed and I did not know it until I read it.

Esi, yes please, if there is a slot Friday evening. And I have deleted the headmaster paragraph for the third and final time.

46me too 5

Facilitator note — Benedikt

Facilitator note — Benedikt. This is the thread I point people at when they ask why this circle exists as a separate room rather than living inside just-starting.

Restarting is not starting. The fear is different, the knowledge is different, and there is usually a layer of shame that a genuinely new member does not carry. Putting restarters in with beginners means they spend their first week explaining themselves, which is precisely what Izzy wrote and deleted four times.

If you are reading this in your own gap, whatever its length and whatever caused it: there is no re-entry procedure and nobody is keeping a record.