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Well, another year has passed. This is the first year I haven't been pregnant or had a baby in tow for about 5 years now. And because of that, I was able to turn the focus back to me. My first objective? To conquer my panic disorder. I've been in therapy for 15 months now, and every single day for those 15 months, I have logged my anxiety levels and my anticipated anxiety levels, as well as any exposures I have done. (Exposures are things that make me confront my anxiety, things that I would have avoided in the past.)

I'm such a perfectionist that I'm almost always looking at where I need to go, instead of celebrating how far I've come. As part of a birthday present to myself, I decided to go back and look at my logs, starting with my birthday last year.

I counted them up, and I noted 116 exposures I've done in the last 365 days. Imagine something that gives you cold sweats, makes you want to pass out or throw up - then imagine intentionally putting yourself in those situations once every three days. It's intense.

Not all of them go swimmingly. I've had 7 knock-down, drag-out panic attacks in the last year. Lots of others gave me significant trouble, but didn't put me out of commission. But the vast majority of exposures were fine. I have developed a pattern. I get anxious in the lead-up to something. Then I peak in the first 15 minutes or so - sweating, dizzy, nauseous - and then I calm down and do just fine. Last year I would bail on things in those first fifteen minutes. Now I am able to remember, through that, that I know the ending to this story already. I know I'll be fine.

What's interesting about looking back at all of my exposures is that they have changed in some pretty dramatic ways. Things that I flagged as exposures in the fall and winter of last year are not things I have noted in the last few months. Some are the same, the bigger ones, but lots of the day to day things that used to make me crazy now are fine.

So it's been a good year on that front. Progress on my journey.