Personal growth.

You realize there is something in your life that you want to change.

You’re aware of it for months or years. You do a ton of work.

That thing you want to change doesn’t budge.

Some other things get better – you’re more authentic, less reactive.

But that thing you would really like to change? Still there.

Acceptance may be the best way to start moving toward change. I can’t change something I don’t fully acknowledge as a real part of my life.

If you try to change something before you accept it, you end up playing all kind of mind games where you blame other people for your problems, even though on some level you know it’s you.

I get in anxiety spirals with social interactions. Email and text may be the worst, but in-person interactions are a close second.

You say something, they say something, and all of a sudden you feel like you’ve been completely misunderstood and someone thinks something about you that you don’t want them to think (Note, I didn’t say Something That’s Not True).

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t having periodic freak outs about my interactions with others.

There is a core of safety, mainly my immediate family and a couple of friends. We understand each other and that won’t go south with one dumb conversation. But that leaves basically the entire rest of the world as a landmine of misunderstanding. On a recent Monday, I went to see my doctor for my yearly physical. I’ve been seeing the same doctor since my second daughter was a baby and I spent months in a deep pit of depression.

Sitting on the exam table all those years ago, I told my doctor about my experience, and she said, “Oh, that’s normal after having a baby.” And that was it.

It happened again after my third kid.

And it kept being a pattern in my life, these black pits of depression interspersed with moments of freedom and joy that made me wonder if I was really depressed at all. And crushing cycles of anxiety that made me alternately feel like I was stuck in skin a size too small, or I was losing my mind.

You can know what you’re experiencing isn’t rational, but that doesn’t make it less real.

So I was back in my doctor’s office, with a sheaf of paper on a clipboard screening me for depression and anxiety. As I do every year at my physical, I answered honestly, and silently hoped that my doctor would read it and talk to me about medication that might help.

I know that anti-anxiety and anti-depression meds aren’t great. The side effects can be pretty crappy. They don’t always work. I also know that when I’m not coping well, having a life line might be helpful. I know mushrooms worked for me, but a trip to the Netherlands every year isn’t exactly in the budget, and the decriminalization that is taking place in the U.S. doesn’t answer the question of how you safely find and use the mushrooms once you get to Denver, Oakland, or Santa Fe.

My doctor suggested diaphragmatic breathing. It helps the body reset, she said.

I’m meditating every day, and doing deep breathing in between, I told her, and I’m still freaking out a lot of the time.

Diaphragmatic breathing, she repeated.

And she sent me home with an antibiotic for my every-other-year sinus infection, and recommended a new med to help me deal with the sinus symptoms until the infection cleared up.

I didn’t know it at the time, because she didn’t mention it, nor did my pharmacist, but the medication she suggested to me has a moderate risk of interacting with my thyroid meds, causing crazy anxiety. Guess what kind of week I had?

Days of alternating between freaking out and crying, and one night of lying awake all night listening to the Chaplain breathe. And multiple meltdowns.

I mentioned to a friend how my week had gone, and she told me she had heard you weren’t supposed to mix those two meds for just that reason.

Today, it seems like the crazy anxiety has broken, in no small part, I think, to spending several hours hanging out with a friend who gets me and vice versa.

My doctor has one kid. I sometimes get the feeling she thinks that my problems are a natural result of my having a huge family, choosing to stay home with them much of the time, choosing to homeschool. Maybe I’m just projecting the ways I judge myself.

It might just be that I had one especially terrible week because of a medication interaction and that things will be better now.

When we quit all our activities this year, I cut out a lot of the paranoid moments because I wasn’t forcing myself into situations where I’d feel obligated to have superficial conversation with people I don’t know well and who don’t have any interest in having a deeper relationship.

The worst triggers of the paranoia are gone. And yet sometimes it still rears its ugly head and I wish there were a magic pill, a silver bullet that would be available for those moments when I get stuck tightly in my own head.

I think, my doctor could fix this if she would just say yes to my silent question.

But instead, she says, your meditation and mindfulness practices aren’t enough, you need diaphragmatic breathing. I’ve been trying it, in that futilistic way that you might approach a solution that has been offered because 30-45 minutes of meditation a day isn’t enough to kill your anxiety.

Part of me doesn’t want it to help, as an I Told You So. Part of me wishes meditation fixed everything.

I know that isn’t how it works. It would be easier if it were.

Our Tobago waterfall – another medicinal balm for my brain and body. We’ll be heading back to Tobago in just a few days.