Frankenchicken

  When you're bipolar, you alternate between feeling like that proverbial chicken with its head cut off and feeling like that chicken's head.  I feel as if Depakote has reattached the head to the chicken.  Now Frankenchicken gets to pick up the pieces of his life and sort out what's what.  I never knew how good it feels to be more or less whole.
  Today my wife and I went to speak with a doctor down in Jacksonville about the results of a psychological evaluation I took a couple weeks ago.  He asked my wife what she noticed about my personality before the Depakote.  She told him a lot of her observations of my behavior.  Without even knowing it, she touched on some very telling signs of bipolar disorder like grandiosity.  Several of the things she mentioned corroborated the results of the test that the doctor already had in his hand.
  He pointed out that the evaluation I filled out took place before I was prescribed the Depakote.  He was curious as to how I would respond to the test now that I'm on it.  I went downstairs to the computer and redid the test.  This time, he said I seem to exhibit a lot less symptoms of bipolar disorder in my answers.  So now, I have two Navy psychologists, one civilian psychologist and one Navy psychiatrist who all agree I have bipolar disorder.  Whoda thunk it?

Rooting Out The Lows

  All this was at the subconscious level, but growing up I always noticed how different I was from everyone else. I always had the Korean way hammered into me, in which there are no individual opinions.  If you're Korean, there are certain things you're supposed to like and dislike.  For instance, Korean pears.  You just have to like Korean pears.  They will feed them to you no matter what because they can't conceive of anybody not liking them.  If you tell them you don't the only thing they can think of is that you must have had a bad one.  You must keep eating them until you find one you like, but it doesn't matter if you never do because you're the problem, not the pears.
  All those differences made me feel as if I weren't normal.  If a song came on that I didn't like, but it was popular, I was just supposed to listen to it because it's popular.  No wonder I had such a low self esteem growing up.  Add to that the fact that when I would move around because of my dad, none of my friends would ever even try to keep in touch with me.
  It's only been since I met Kayla that I've started to root out the sources of my deep inner emotional turmoil. I'm finally getting to a place where I'm beginning to heal a little bit.  Also, yesterday my psychiatrist gave me a prescription for Depakote which is a mood stabilizer.  I'm hoping the road to healthiness will be under foot soon.
  Tomorrow I'll be putting out chapter 20 of the Nocent, which is short but surprising.  Also, tomorrow I'll finish up writing the 5th part of The Greater Number and put that out too.