I try not to assign certain "time" or "calendar" labels to my own personal journey, but it's hard not to given the world we live in. In "real time", it's taken me over a decade. But when I get angry or frustrated with myself at how long this thing is dragging on, I try to stop and remember that nothing has really gone according to plan. I entered therapy with current T after seeing 3 different T's (first was amazing but she resigned from the agency after 8 months, the other two didn't work out). I initially came to her with social phobia and depression. Then my father was diagnosed with a brain tumor 4 months later, and everything changed. He died the following summer. I was almost 21. Just like that—my own father had driven me to my first visit with T, and a year later, he was gone. He was 60 and in great shape; it was just so unfair. After that, I decided to finish my bachelor's degree and all the social crap that came along with going to college. Then I graduated and moved away from the area. And THEN a load of people just started dying on me. I have lost 5 people since I moved away, all people close to me. How in the world could I ever have focused on working on the anxiety when all this devastating stuff kept crashing down on me? I start to catastrophize and feel like I have been wasting away my twenties, supposedly the best years of one's life, but then I remember to be gentle with myself because of this "cluster" of bad luck that has fallen on me. I have not been able to do that in the past, I tended to minimize what was going on around me, the forces that were beyond my control.

I guess what I am trying to say (to anyone reading) is to not get disappointed or lose hope just because you feel you might not have made enough progress over a week's, month's, or year's time. Don't lose heart. Yes, money can be an issue if therapy tends to go on longer than you want, but sometimes things are beyond anyone's control. I am so grateful my therapist keeps seeing me, keeps talking to me on the phone, even though I am 2 states away. I am so glad I didn't quit on this all the times I wanted to, because I am finally learning for the first time in my life how to stop and recognize what I am feeling, good or bad, and the reasons why. I am finally learning why I have so much trouble with relating to people, to stop feeling somehow "defective", realizing that I need people like every other person on this planet, and how to accept my vulnerability. I'm still a work in progress, I'm not all the way there yet, and I don't know how much longer it will take. But I will just trust my instincts and know when it's "time"...not going by the calendar, either...my own internal clock.