What finishing this process actually felt like, compared to what I expected

Expected a dramatic sense of completion once I actually filed, and the reality was quieter and stranger than that — more of an odd, disorienting adjustment period than a triumphant finish line, since after months of near-daily focus on this, suddenly having nothing active to do about it felt genuinely unfamiliar. For a while after filing, I kept instinctively checking things or thinking about tasks that no longer needed doing, simply out of habit built up over many months of active work. It took real, conscious effort to actually let go and shift into the waiting phase rather than continuing to mentally treat the case as something requiring my active daily attention. If you're approaching your own filing date: it's worth knowing in advance that the immediate aftermath might feel anticlimactic or oddly disorienting rather than purely triumphant — that's a normal adjustment, not a sign anything's wrong, just the strange feeling of a long, all-consuming project suddenly shifting into a waiting phase.