So I had a very weird dream that I feel like I should write down so I don't forget it. Just a little set up first. I grew up going to a Protestant church that eventually had a split. Half of the group went and started a new church. My family went with that church. The original church ended up improving itself and is now going strong while the split-off church is trying to revitalize itself. The last time I went to either church was about 5 years ago. But my one set of grandparents, aunt and uncle, and one cousin still goes there. I'm really close to the grandparents but have a really shallow relationship with the aunt, uncle, and cousin. They are nice people, with some odd views of the world (but who doesn't?), but I more or less have no issues with any of them.

So, my dream took place in the original church. Apparently I had been going there for a while and had become an active member. My uncle apparently was at a place of leadership within the church and my cousin was his assistant. I was walking along with my uncle down a hallway and he made a comment along the lines of, "You are doing really well here. Even (some dude's name that I didn't recognize and can't recall) has seen some vast improvements over what you were like when you first came here." I felt irritated that someone had decided to judge me before and had taken it upon himself to judge me again. So I asked my uncle, "So what was I like before then?" My uncle didn't answer, said goodbye to me, and left through some door along the hallway wall.

I then walked up to my cousin who was further down the hall, said 'hello', and asked her what 'dude x' had said about me when I first came to the church. She brushed it off. So I asked, "Is it because I'm sarcastic?" She replied, "Well, actually, yes that was the problem. You may not be aware of it but you're kind of a 'glass half empty' sort of guy." To which I replied, "Well, believe it or not, as a mental health therapist I have to occasionally be a 'glass half full' sort of guy in rare instances." Not taking the bait (I said that last sentence with real dry, bitter tone) she replied, "Well I'm sure the people you help appreciate that." I replied, "Not as often as you might think." She asked, "Why's that?" I replied, "Because people don't like to change." With that she entered the main service area. I took a step towards that door, stopped, turned around, and walked out of the church toward my car.

If I were a psychoanalysis I would probably have all sorts of ideas of what that means. Right now all I can do is make guesses. But it was probably the most articulate dream I've ever had.

So I've said what I'm about to say 10 billion times on this site already but just in case one of the readers of this blog don't know; I'm a mental health therapist. My job involves both running therapy with clients and also running assessments and then putting labels (mental illness diagnoses) on people. I don't like that I have to give people labels and usually don't tell my clients, whether they become my long-term clients or if I only see them for the one assessment, what I've diagnosed them with. I don't do this because I worry that people will feel as if that diagnosis will come to define them. That that label will now dictate how the rest of their life will proceed. It will determine how much success they have in life. How many friends they have. How well their intimate relationships go. Everything will pass through the lens of that new label.

Rather, I give clients a long winded explanation of what the diagnosis means. But I never offer the actual label itself. However if a person isn't happy with my long winded answer and asks, again, for what they were diagnosed with I'll tell them. I'll give the diagnosis, give an explanation for why I picked that (or those) diagnosis(es) and ask if they have any questions. Then I'll give a big long speech that usually goes something like this;

"Though this label fits where you are in your life right now I think it's important for me to say that that label doesn't define you. It is simply an aspect of who you are right now. When I look at you and talk with you I don't see you as that label. I see you as a person who is having some problems and is looking for some help. I feel it is the job of the therapist to offer that help as well as he/she can. This label defines you as much as any other label I might give you. I might say you are kind and intelligent. Those labels are as applicable to you as this diagnosis. Because you, like the rest of us, are complex and unique. You aren't simply a diagnosis and you aren't simply the problems we discuss in here."

I'm saying all of this because I need you all to understand, then, why I get so irritated with what people feel my job is and how we as a society tend to define the mentally ill. At times I feel like I am simply an agent of my society peddling social norms and taking away rights and privileges to those that don't meet those norms as per the bidding of my society.

There was a remark recently that sparked this response from me. It was on my twitter feed following the US Senate not passing the new gun laws. A person I follow, who will remain nameless as I don't want to give the impression that I'm mad at this person, said this in response;

"Thanks a lot US Senate, crazies and criminals can continue to buy guns..."

Now I don't really have a dog in the gun law race. But I guess my ears burn when I hear things like 'crazies' shouldn't being allowed to buy a product while us 'normals' can. The issue I have with this is that there's this stigma associated with all mentally ill that is so widely accepted and it bothers me because, really, I'm one of the people who have created that group that is now stigmatized by 'officially' labeling people in the first place. The stigma being 'All mentally ill are the same. They all have some failing in some way that keeps them from being of the same caliber and of being able to have the same rights, privileges, and responsibilities as us normals.' or something along those lines.

Now the person who I quoted was probably referring to an aggressive 'crazy' and I'm probably being overly sensitive. But I'm seeing mentally ill people who are all, generally speaking, seen by that label, 'mentally ill', alone by our society if they know my clients carry that label. But not all mentally ill are the same. Not all are risks to others. Not all are suicidal. Just like not all 'normals' are the same. Not all 'normals' aren't risks to others or aren't suicidal.

I guess what I hope comes from this very long post is that those who read it take a moment to rethink 'mental illness' and really try to see people under that label as uniquely as they see everyone else and try not to just throw out words like 'crazies' or make the wild assumptions about what mental illness-based labels mean. The world and the people who live on it are not so simple.

NOTE: If you know who I quoted please don't give the name in the comments. I don't want that person's name dragged through the mud because I had a reaction to something he said. If he knew how much it bothered me he would probably be really upset about it.

It was one year last year since I had my incident that lead to me not drinking. It was at the last Easter party we had at my parent's house last year when I got so drunk that I passed out while preparing to eat cake, came to with my face in cake, and then walked my way upstairs to a room and passed out again. Around the 13th of April it will have been 6 months since my last drink. I knew it had been a year for a long time (well, since I knew that yesterday was Easter) but it didn't 'click' until yesterday afternoon just before we had another Easter party at my Aunt's house.

I didn't think it was on my mind much until that night when I had a dream that my cousin, who was there at the party, gave someone next to me a rum and coke and gave me a coke but it looked just like the rum and coke the person next to me had. She said, "That's just a coke because that's all you have now isn't it?". I shook my head 'yes' but felt uneasy because I didn't trust that the drink I had was just a coke. I was worried that she had switched the drinks on accident because they were so similar looking. But I was also kind of hoping that I had a rum and coke. So I moved the glass to my nose and smelled to see if I could smell the rum. All I could smell was ice as I looked down and saw a ton of ice and just a little bit of coke at the bottom. So I had to make a decision; do I drink the coke with the chance it might have rum in it or not? Before I decided I woke up. Now I'm not trained in dream work but if I were I would have had a fucking field day with that one.

So I have a nephew who is just over 2 years old. It seems like every time I see him he's a little different because he's constantly learning so much so quickly. Plus that learning is usually a culmination of several different things all coming together to form one whole. So it's rare for me to see him not only learn something but to see him learn it from a direct interaction with a specific thing.

Well yesterday I finally got to see such learning take place. My sister has added a few game to her i-phone so that my nephew can play with them. What he likes to do is take the phone to someone and play two games with that person; Angry Birds Space and Temple Run. Yesterday was my turn to play those games with him.

So he ran over to me phone in hand, jumped on to the couch next to me, plopped the phone in my hands, and urged me to play. The first game we played was Angry Birds. He pulled up a level that he knew how to beat and showed me. Then he got a level he couldn't beat and couldn't figure what to do. All of the level prior to this new level required him to shot the bird left to right and didn't rely too much on gravity from other planets. This new level required him to shot right to left and use a planet's gravitational pull to whip the bird around the planet to hit the pigs. His problem was he kept shooting left to right. So I showed him the concept of shooting right to left and using gravity (by doing it myself with one of our birds). Once he saw me do it he figured it out and then, in subsequent levels, applied shooting in all direction and gravity to hit the pigs. It was amazing. One simple example was all he needed to grasp a pretty complex concept for such a young kid.

He then pulled up Temple Run. Basically he knew how to jump but he didn't know how to slide or turn left and right. He also didn't have the timing down at all. He just kept jumping over and over. So I showed how to jump, slide, and turn left and right and associated those actions with words ('up', 'down', 'left', 'right'). I then gave him the phone back and, as he played, said the words with the right timing so that he could react appropriately. He got it right away. He had to act pretty fast too and he did it really well. Then I stopped speaking and he kept progressing through the game with his newly attuned timing.

What was the coolest thing about this experience was seeing how much fun he had while he was learning at the same time. Plus we got to spend time together which we both liked. I've been playing games for a long time. I was playing the Colecovision when I was not that much older then my nephew. So I know that they have had an effect on how I think and perceive the world. But this was the first time that that correlation was made so explicitly clear to me. It was also great to see how much fun these games can be. I think that as I've gotten older I've taken games more and more seriously. Which is fine and I'm happy that the medium has grown to such a degree that I can do so. But it's kind of nice to remember that games can also be a ton of fun too. I guess I just needed a 2 year old to remind me of these things.

I just read about the most bizarre brain condition. So in your brain there are pockets filled with cerebral spinal fluid and nothing else. There are no neurons (brain cells) there. These areas aren't huge because your brain needs as much room as possible to hold the estimated 100 billion neurons that live there. So this picture seems insane to me:

The right pair of images is a normal brain. The left pair is of a brain that has extra large ventricles. The black spaces represents the ventricles for each brain. The top images are of the top of the brain and the bottom are of the side. Remember, there are no brain cells there. Further, there are important parts of the brain that are just not in the right place if they are there at all. At the very bottom of the brain there is the brain stem and behind the brain stem is the cerebellum. It's easiest to see that in the bottom-left image. The brain stem is the black rod that is coming up from the bottom of the picture and the cerebellum is behind it. For one, that cerebellum is a lot smaller then the brain to the right. But what's insane is that above the brain stem and cerebellum there's supposed to be the thalamus and hypothalamus among other important areas of the brain. If I remember right, one of the main jobs of the thalamus is to transmit information from the other parts of the brain to the frontal cortex. In the left pair I have no idea where the thalamus is. For that matter, the frontal cortex is really, really small. The whole brain is really small. Apparently 10%-15% the size of a normal brain.

So what's surprising is that this particular brain is of a man who has only mild mental retardation and is in nearly every way fully functional. In fact, despite the slightly lower intelligence he's pretty average. So that brain, as small as it is, must have all of the components of the other, normal brain and nearly, if not just as many, neurons. That tiny brain would seemingly have 100 billions neurons in it somehow. Or at least the neurons that are left are taking over the duties of the neurons that should be there. That could be happening with the brain structures. Which is crazy.

What's even more incredible is that there's a woman in Britain who is a qualified nurse, completely fully functional, and has an IQ that is above average. This is the top of her brain:

That's fucking nuts dudes!

You can read up on the lady here; Link

Here's the story on the other brain; Link

Fuck yeah! I'm running 15 miles a week now out on the roads with hills and all that fun stuff and I'm weight training 45 minutes every other day. I've lost 20 lbs and 4 inches in my waist. I have had a drink but it was one and I was done. Not to say that I didn't feel a pull to keep going but I didn't. So I'm feeling pretty good at the moment.

Damn. It's been a long time since I've had a drink. I actually didn't realize until I came back to look at that last post. I've also kept up the exercise routine and that's working out really well. I feel calmer. It's pretty cool. I think I'm beyond the natural 'high' that comes with being clean for a few weeks and am now on to just being a normal person who doesn't drink. It's neat. I don't even think I would like to have a drink. The desire just isn't there anymore. I'm doing so well with the exercising and I feel so calm and relaxed without drinking. All that I can think about for when I was drinking was how hectic everything was. How fucking exhausting and monotonous everything seemed. Things just seem better. I don't really have words to describe it which is why I'm sort of rambling now. But it's safe to say I'm doing very well.

So I had a bit of a setback. I went on vacation and also went on a binge. I couldn't even tell you what I was thinking when I did it. I felt overwhelmed for some reason. It was bullshit though. I just wanted to drink. It turned into binging because, no matter what I did, I couldn't get drunk. My tolerance is so high I couldn't get drunk no matter what I did. I drank a lot and wasn't getting the feeling I was looking for. I came to realization that this 'feeling' was a falsehood. I was chasing a dream. So I've decided to chase something else. Something palpable that I can realize and achieve. I'm working out, eating healthy, and am bound and determined to get myself and my dogs into the best shape of our lives. This is a goal I can reach. This can, and has, lead to a feeling that I can actually feel.

...and counting. I haven't had an issue with impulses for the past ten days. It's been great. I even turned down a few drinks. We'll see where this goes from here.

I actually feel really good sober. It's weird but my mood is better. I feel more energetic. My memory is better. It's pretty neat. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't been tempted to drink again. Just outside of where I'm typing there is a cavalcade of alcohol waiting to be drunk. But I don't want to lose how I'm feeling now. It's nice because I have been stressed this week. Not everything has gone perfectly. I've been overwhelmed by clients. Money is a continuous problem as a student. But I'm not drinking despite the stress. I'm proud of myself.