1. Learning to cook and learning to cry.

One of my favorite meditations is “change” by the app Stop, Think, Breathe. This was my very first meditation app, and it came to me at a time when everything about my life was, well, changing. I was 19 years old, regularly having panic attacks and living through untreated PTSD. I’m careful here to say untreated, but not un-diagnosed. I had been diagnosed the year before, and would go on to be diagnosed multiple times by multiple therapists. I had simply stopped going to therapy because I believed it was not a good use of my time. I believed I was doing ok, because I was able to get up and go to class and sure I was miserable but I was productive and being miserable is fine because that’s just life, life is hard. Right? Exactly.

It wasn’t until I walked out of my organic chemistry class midway through because I couldn’t breathe, decided to go to my room and try to fold my mountain of laundry, and ended up sitting in my top bunk yelling at my recently dead grandmother for 2 hours about why everything she taught me was ruining my life, that I realized I was not, in fact, doing ok.

I hated the term PTSD. I remember telling my friend, “it’s not like I was in Vietnam.” It made me feel like everyone could see that I’d had a terrible life. This was something I’d preferred to keep to myself, mostly because I genuinely believed this was the safest option. And so I really, really hated the idea of going to therapy to be treated like someone who’d had a terrible life. But, there was something about crying hysterically on a mid-day afternoon while life buzzed around me, knowing that eventually I would have to buzz too and that I’d have to pretend that buzzing was easy. I really, really wanted someone to know that buzzing was hard. Even if it was just one person. That one person became my therapist, and after four years of working with her I can honestly say that buzzing has become a lot easier. Buzzing is actually enjoyable. I buzz on purpose, and I buzz for fun.

All of this is to say that one of my favorite meditations is called “change.” The line from this meditation that sticks out to me the most is “every moment is a chance to determine your next step.” I heard this at a time when the concept of determining my next step was unimaginable to me. I honestly had never considered that I could determine my own steps. I was attending the college my parents wanted me to go to, to study the major my parents wanted me to study, to have the career my parents wanted me to have. Until that time, I was very familiar with looking at life like a cookbook written by other people. My job was to follow the recipe, and to take for granted that it was a recipe for “success”—whatever that means. That book didn’t have any recipes for happiness, or joy, or fulfillment. It honestly didn’t have recipes for getting out of bed, which were the ones I really could’ve used on the days when “success” wasn’t anywhere near what I was in the mood for.

Now, I’m in a master’s program. I’m attending the school I thought I wanted to go to, to study the major I thought I wanted to study, to have the career I genuinely believed I wanted to have. But all of that is changing. I’m learning that even if you write your own cookbook, sometimes the recipes don’t come out the way you hoped. When my mom cooks, she makes notes in the margins of the recipes, pointing out what she’ll do differently next time. I think that’s what it means to determine your next step.