A reminder to myself, and maybe to others here: this is a marathon, treat it like one

Closing thought after being through the whole process now: the single mental shift that helped me most wasn't any specific tactic, it was genuinely internalizing early on that this was a marathon, not something to sprint through and be done with quickly. Once I stopped measuring progress against an unrealistic "this should be moving faster" internal timeline and instead measured it against realistic, sustainable weekly effort over many months, the whole experience felt less like a constant uphill struggle and more like steady, manageable work. The posts in this community about pacing, about not comparing yourself to others' timelines, about treating slow stretches as normal rather than alarming — I think they're all pointing at versions of this same underlying shift. If you're early in this process and it already feels overwhelming: that feeling is more about the mismatch between expecting fast progress and the process's actual realistic pace than it is about anything being wrong with your case or your effort. Adjusting the expectation, not just pushing harder, is often the more useful move.