Nobody claps for maintenance

Dear You,

In month four, a woman I barely knew stopped me in the parking garage to tell me I looked amazing. In month fourteen, I passed the same woman in the same garage and she said “Hey,” which is what you say to a person, not a project.

That’s the whole post, in a way. But let me say the rest.

The applause stops

While you’re changing visibly, the world narrates it for you. Coworkers notice. Relatives notice. The cashier at the pharmacy notices. The attention is strange and sometimes unwelcome, and I spent plenty of time wishing people would stop commenting on my body. Then they did, and I discovered I’d been living on it a little. Not the compliments exactly. The evidence. Every “you look great” was outside confirmation that something was happening.

In maintenance, nothing is happening. That’s the point. That’s also the problem. Doing the same careful, quiet things every day and having them produce the same result is success, and from the outside it looks like nothing at all. Nobody claps for the same Sunday as the Sunday before. Nobody sends a card.

Month fourteen

I want to be honest about how lonely month fourteen was, because the loss story has a plot and the maintenance story doesn’t, and nobody warns you about the second act.

The group chat that cheered every milestone had moved on to someone’s new baby. My prescriber appointments spread out to every few months, so even the clinical attention thinned. People who’d asked how it was going stopped asking, because the answer was “the same,” and “the same” doesn’t make conversation.

I also lost the people who were in it with me. Some stopped the medication, for reasons that were theirs and good. Some reached a place they were happy with and quietly stepped away from the whole subject. I don’t judge any of it. But it meant the room got emptier at exactly the moment I needed it full.

Finding people who get it

What eventually helped was finding, deliberately, two or three people who were also in the quiet stretch. Not a big community. Small. A friend from a support group who was eighteen months in. A coworker who’d mentioned once, in passing, that she was “on the maintenance side of things” and then changed the subject. I circled back to her. We get coffee monthly now and talk about everything, and sometimes about this.

The thing we give each other isn’t applause. It’s recognition. She knows what it means that I ordered the small bowl and didn’t think about it. I know what it means that she went to her brother’s wedding and had a normal time. Those aren’t achievements anyone else would see. They’re the whole game.

I eventually wrote down what got me through that stretch, the identity work and the belonging work, and it became a guide called After the Noise Stops. I mention it once, here, because month fourteen is exactly who it’s for.

Marking what nobody sees

Since the world stopped narrating, I started. Small ways, mostly private.

• A note in my phone, once a month, one line: what’s the same, what’s different. Reading twelve of them in a row is the closest thing to applause I’ve found.
• The same two outfits, worn on the first of every month. Not to measure anything. To notice that the ordinary has held.
• A dinner out, alone, every quarter, at a place with good bread. I order what I want, eat what I can, and sit with how normal it feels. That feeling used to be impossible. It’s a milestone with no witnesses.
• Telling my coffee friend. She claps. Quietly, over the table, like a golf crowd. It’s enough.

Maintenance isn’t the epilogue. It’s the longest chapter, and the quietest, and the one where you find out whether this was a diet or a life. Nobody’s going to notice you’re still here. Notice it yourself. Then go find one person who’ll notice with you.

Want to tell me something? Reply to any Low Volume email, or write to me here. I read everything.

Getting Quiet shares lived experience, general education, and practical tools. For medical decisions and individual treatment questions, talk with your qualified care team.