One a day for the next two weeks then probably two a day for the next 6-12 months.
I sat down in the doctor’s office and cried, he told me to take deep breaths and calm down and because I don’t have a very good association with that phrase, “calm down” I didn’t know how it was going to go. But I needed to say, “I have been very anxious and clenching my jaw and my head hurts” even if I blurted it through tears and fingers and had to repeat it. I didn’t really say all the things that I probably could have said like, “I am afraid of going outside and socialising” and, “Nothing I do is good enough, even if I practice really hard” but he probably knew. He asked about my family’s mental health history, and I told him all my sisters’, my mother’s, my grandmother’s and my papa’s problems. He said it wasn’t my fault, it was genes. It helped me reclaim my brain a bit, for all the people who’ve told me how they’ve cured themselves of sadness… I can’t cure myself for life and I don’t think of myself as a sad person but there are moments when I am overtaken by emotions that I can not control, as much as I have tried to.