Searching Within

Journaling

  • Getting Me Right

    In December, I raised two errors in my medical records. The After Visit Summary said I was a year younger than I was. And my diagnosis was listed as bipolar 1 instead of bipolar 2.

    Different flavors of the same underlying issue: being documented incorrectly. But not equally serious.

    The Diagnosis Piece

    Bipolar 1 and bipolar 2 are not typo-adjacent. They are clinically distinct conditions.

    My layperson understanding of Bipolar 1 includes things like: thinking you’re God, hallucinating, ending up on a rooftop thinking you can fly. The Richard Gere movie Mr. Jones captures the picture pretty well. Bipolar 1 involves full manic episodes, sometimes with psychosis, sometimes requiring hospitalization.

    I have never had any of those experiences. As a person (not a medical professional), I know I am not Bipolar 1.

    Bipolar 2 lives in hypomania and depression. When I am hypomanic, I recognize the pattern. High energy underneath everything. Talking fast. High creativity. Sleeping very little. Overspending. Promiscuity. Changes in appetite. Less severe than full mania. Hypo, as in less than. I don’t lose contact with reality. But it’s still bipolar. And the depressive episodes carry their own weight.

    The treatment approaches for the two overlap but are not identical. Some antidepressants that a bipolar 2 patient tolerates could trigger mania in a bipolar 1 patient. Providers need to know which one they are managing.

    I am bipolar 2. That has always been my diagnosis.

    How the Error Got There

    At some point in my history of medical records, someone changed the diagnosis from bipolar 2 to bipolar 1. A typo, a misclick, a moment of distraction. I don’t know who or when. I could probably trace it back through old summaries, but that part doesn’t matter.

    What matters is that the change wasn’t my current provider. He inherited the error from whichever chart he received. His template then pulled the wrong diagnosis forward, session after session, without anyone noticing. That’s the thing about template systems: they don’t verify. They repeat.

    Tim didn’t introduce the error. Tim is the one who corrected it once I raised the flag.

    What It Feels Like to Be Documented Incorrectly

    For months, when I looked at my AVS after each session, I saw a version of me that wasn’t me. Wrong age. Wrong diagnosis. A quiet, ongoing misrepresentation.

    Not the kind of thing you can complain loudly about. It’s paperwork. It’s a template pull. It’s not personal.

    Except it is personal. Because the record is the thing that follows me forward. The record is what other clinicians see when they look up my chart. The record is the version of me that persists past the hour we spent together in the office.

    Being documented incorrectly, session after session, is a form of quiet erasure. Not intentional. But real.

    The Correction and What It Meant

    The diagnosis eventually got fixed. That mattered.

    Tim took an extra step to ask me to send a screenshot, in order to know exactly what I was seeing. It mattered not because Tim clicked a button. Everyone with template-editing access can click a button. It mattered because Tim paid attention to the raised flag, went in, remembered to look, made the change.

    The correction was a small act of being heard.

    What Attention Looks Like

    I think this is part of why the birthday email I sent was so pointed about the AVS template

    It isn’t really about the age. It’s about whether the person documenting me is paying enough attention to keep the record aligned with the actual person.

    Corrections require noticing. Noticing requires attention. Attention is what tells me I’m being tended to, not just processed.

    Six months to update a diagnosis is a lot of processing. A little bit of tending would have gotten it done faster.

    That’s the ask.

  • Gratitude in the Dryer

    miniature black metal carabiner

    I have developed a habit of carrying around two or three gratitude objects in my left jeans front pocket. They would get transferred absent-mindedly from pocket to pocket when changing jeans or shorts. Recently, there was a pocket check failure before laundry chores. Now. There is a loose gratitudes that had traveled from pocket to washer to loose in the dryer.

    The object is a miniature black metal carabiner. Cyclic machine murmur is the constant. The ting, the louder drop, the multiple variations of the scratch, the sliding between the blades. What an interesting way to sit in silliness. Not sure why this type of unpredictable and random noise is soothing and not irritating. Perhaps a music theorist can explain the intricacies of calculating irritating vs calming sound.

    Research Says

    The carabiner in the dryer is comforting because it’s unpredictable but bounded. You know it’s going to make noise—the only question is when and what kind. The brain finds that kind of controlled randomness satisfying rather than threatening.”

    Slam poetry, bardcore, and hard rock share a quality of pushing toward you — they demand a response, they impose a rhythm your body either accepts or resists. The carabiner asks nothing. It just occasionally announces itself and then goes quiet again.
    There’s also the context. The dryer is domestic, familiar, safe. The sound is embedded in an activity you understand completely. Nothing about it requires decoding. Your nervous system can relax around it.

    Music theorists would point to something called stochastic resonance — the idea that a small amount of random noise can actually enhance perception and create a kind of pleasant background engagement for the brain. The carabiner is doing that accidentally.

    Also: the dryer has a rhythm underneath the randomness — the tumbling cycle, the consistent hum. The carabiner improvises over a steady beat. That’s actually the opposite of bardcore, which removes the steady beat entirely.

  • Joy of Paper

    Conversation was happening. An argument that wasn’t arguing. A convincing. I didn’t believe him. Suddenly there was a rush of movement. He popped out of his chair and exclaimed…

    [12:19] Tim: I feel like I would benefit from writing this out on paper.

    Tim has never moved that fast. (A close second is the day he showed me his 3D printer on video from his home office. Animated and bringing samples to the screen.) Today, the paper grab was faster. A sure fire way to pull someone out of a stuck state of mind is to watch someone rush across the tiniest office, pushing the office chair aside. Grab from… a drawer or top of desk? A very thin, nearly depleted, small notepad. A dash back to his chair. No pause in the lecture. And now a visual aid in the making.

    Was I even listening now? That was so incredibly fascinating. Before I knew it, the process reversed itself. The page ended up in the bin close to where it was retrieved.

    What? All this activity, and I don’t get to see it?
    Lecture continued. Discussion.

    Seriously! It happened again!

    [20:21] Tim: Let me go back to my piece of paper. [digs note out of bin]
    [20:23] Me: Don’t throw it away.

    The note aided more discussion. And then the paper ends up back in the bin. I never got to see the page. Did I see ovals? Apparently chart or mind map or words wasn’t for my benefit. Later I wished I could have seen. I realized that I wanted to see his handwriting.

    Is it sad, I was highly amused? Maybe nothing to do with paper and unexpected rushing.

    Simple. A good day. And that was a piece.

  • Patterns

    When I was a kid, classmates talked about a Golden Birthday. When the date, within the month, of birth equals age. Not much fun when the day is the 1st. Nothing for a baby to remember. Philip didn’t care when he turned 16. I guess the window for the thing being cool was by middle school.

    I re-envisioned my special birthday calculation. When age matches the last two digits of birth year. Today: my birthday this year is age 63 from 1963. Known as the Beddian Birthday. But nobody cares. I’m the weird kid with an attraction for patterns in numbers.

    The four digit combo for the Goat Yard… the numbers can be 3 numbers in sequence. 6-7-8. Where is the fourth number? When a 6 is rotated directly on top of another 6, it turns into an 8. Hence, one way to remember 6-7-6-6; it is really a sequence. Nothing to do with sex positions. Just a number pattern and graphic design, sans serif font.

    Pattern recognition must be hereditary. My dad first tried to get me to remember a phone number by adding different digits within the number. I got a little confused but years later it made a lot of sense suddenly and I’ve been doing it ever since. The only problem is, I can’t do math in my head so if there were any numbers to add, to find a pattern, they had to be super simple number combinations. Ages and years are handy memory keepers.

    Yet, I don’t think I can get very far memorizing digits of pi.

    My dad was good with math. My brother was a math genius. Bill’s PhD was in topology, basically the math of patterns in shapes.

  • Fix The Template. Don’t Take Six Months.

    Templates are only as good as the accuracy of the data. A worthwhile template needs the right balance of information that is repeatable to save time and provide adequate space to enter fresh content.

    Last December I noticed that I was being documented week after week in the After Visit Summary (AVS) incorrectly “…a 61 year old female who is here for…” I pointed out the flaw. I learned about the efficiency of the medical template.

    Computers are advanced. Seems really silly that the template isn’t automated. Just saying. My diagnosis is now correct. A fix achieved:

    Today is August 1, 2026. My birthday. Will the passage of time be six months again before I get my 63? Not that I really want to get older. I just like accurate date data. I want my people to give me special attention. Get it right. Does it really matter? Ok. Not really.

    I lie. I don’t know why it matters. However, today is the birthday. Something did change. Whether I’m happy about aging isn’t the thing. I want the full treatment… well if it changes in a timely manner I can give back, “Validation provided for effort.” But in this change, effort doesn’t scale. The change is made or not. There is no partial way to get the task done. Maybe pull up the template and just look one day? Or key in the text and forget to hit save?

    Oh well, I can’t think of any example where changing 1 character can have a partial effort.

    Fix the template. Don’t take six months. Complete effort desired. First paragraph. Change 2 to 3. Simple.

  • Still I Stand: A New Confidence Naming

    Back in April, I wrote about confidence naming—the therapy thread where Tim described the idea of an activating phrase. He asked me to name my “confident stance.”

    The idea: if you can name the version of yourself who owns the room, you can step into that version when it matters. I wrote about several phrases I already use:

    • “head up chest out” from Kevin at the gym,
    • “working on it” from unfocused pool laps,
    • “push against the current” from the resistance pool,
    • “driving fast and taking chances” reclaimed for joy,
    • “I’m going” from yellow traffic lights that demand calling Dibs.

    The actual ask Tim made was for a universal phrase. Not several context-specific ones. A single verbal switch that could unlock the whole confident persona no matter the situation. I ended my April post by saying:

    “Which one, if any, is the universal? Still looking and deciding.”

    The discussion went dormant. Tim and I never brought confidence naming back up in session—the daily system he and I use for homework only allowed him to receive the abridged version of the post, not the full backstories.

    This week I think I found something important. It isn’t a phrase. It’s a song. Numerous lines that can be used as personalized phrases that help to invoke confidence. This week on Patreon, Jared Halley shared a sneak preview from his upcoming album of original songs. On a constant loop, I’ve been listening to “Still I Stand.”

    [Chorus]

    Still I stand
    On this broken ground
    Through the silence
    I found my sound
    No chains can hold
    No walls confine
    Still I stand
    This fight is mine

    Every song carries two backstories at once: the songwriter’s and the listener’s. Both live in the lyrics simultaneously. When a song like Still I Stand offers the perfect line, or lines, I find a new confidence naming. “This Fight is Mine” is just one, the best.

    The verses bring you up to speed on the heavy nights, dragging days, weight carried nowhere. The song paints depression without saying the word. Then a flicker: faint and small. Not blinding, not certain. Just a spark. The pre-chorus makes the deal explicit: echoes that fade, scars that stay, strength born from pain. There’s no “and then you’re healed” in this song. The scars stay. That’s part of why the song means so much to me.

    One thing songs do that life doesn’t: they compress time. In the lyric, two lines are one line apart

    Nowhere to go
    But I saw a flicker

    In life, the distance between those two states can be as much as months, or even years. The song delivers the arc in seconds; the actual passage from one to the other takes fortitude.

    When I listen to Still I Stand, I am not the singer. The person in the song has already lived through all or part of something and is ready to claim the fight, is right there, still standing.

    I’ve accomplished plenty. Yet my broken ground still shifts under my feet most days. I don’t know yet what sound might be mine. I can’t claim the no-chains part and have it be true right now. Only true someday, maybe.

    What I can do is borrow. I can play the song, and for the length of it, I can inhabit the stance the singer has reached. The confidence is ready in the music. But loaned, not owned. When the song ends, I go back to my regular self. (Or, I happily play it again.)

    Maybe the universal confidence naming doesn’t have to be just a phrase. A song can provide what is needed—press play, and the confidence is already there. I don’t have to force the feeling. The song brings it out.

    I have all my phrases. Head up chest out still works when I’m walking somewhere. Working on it still works when the pool of tasks is unfocused. But when I need the entire confident persona, I now have a place to go. The whole point of a confidence naming is that it’s a tool to use repeatedly. Not one and done.

    “This fight is mine” carries a lot for a four-word phrase.

    There’s a whole genre of movie moments where a character claims a fight and demands everyone else step back. LOTR: Aragorn stepping forward at the Black Gate; Frodo insisting on carrying the ring alone. Harry Potter vs. Voldemort: “Neither can live while the other survives.” Every boxing movie ever made—”let me handle this.” Every Western showdown. Braveheart, Gladiator.

    The pattern isn’t just about ownership. It’s about earning the right—or wanting the privilege of the hard thing. The hero doesn’t want to share it. Sidekicks want to help; the hero waves them off. Not because help isn’t wanted—because this one is mine to face.

    The hero, in that moment, is always the one—even when others are present. Being “alone” here isn’t about the number of people nearby; it’s about who has to face the thing. Sometimes chosen alone, sometimes forced. In the movies, that isolation is earned—the hero has demanded it. In life it can feel more like this is what I got left, so I claim it as mine. Same words, different origin story. Chosen alone and arrived at alone aren’t the same, but the song fits both.

    And not every fight fits this pattern. Some fights are the kind you claim with pride and stance and voice. Other fights—my future, my aging body, my relationship to time—those aren’t about fighting at all. Those are about accepting. And “this fight is mine” is the wrong language for those times. When the opponent is your own resistance to a reality that already is, the movie-hero framing doesn’t help. The work of acceptance is dissolving the resistance, not doubling down on it. Some fights only I can fight; some things I have to stop fighting.

    There’s another reading of the chorus I can’t unhear. The silence is the trigger—it means no one is here. And the freedom lines—no chains holding, no walls confining—read differently against that silence. This isn’t only liberation. When you’re alone—both bad and good—you’re in charge. No one holding you. No one sheltering you. The freedom and the isolation are the same fact. Finding my sound becomes about making progress through the chains and walls, not around them. And then still standing—this fight mine, as in nobody else’s, nobody helping.

    I keep having to do so much alone. Depression is one of those walls. So are the voices—sometimes actual people, sometimes only my own head. Same internal walls either way. They need no help from external ones.

    There’s a difference between “I hate this” and “this fight is mine.” Both are honest responses to hardship. One is protest—legitimate. One is claiming—also legitimate. One doesn’t replace the other, and pretending you can always be in the second one would be dishonest. You can’t give the same fight all the time. It’s easy to stand on the hill or enjoy the broken ground when mood or life lets you be full of courage. On the days those resources aren’t there, “I hate this” is the true answer.

    On the in-between days there’s something smaller. Not fighting the fight well. Not winning. Just refusing to hand it off. Standing up when I’d rather stay down. Playing the song.

    The song sings the fully-claimed version. My job on any given day is whatever version I can muster. And the standing isn’t a one-time thing.

    Still I stand.

    This fight is mine.

    Both have been added to the collection of confidence naming.

    Look for Jared…

    Related Posts

    Background Stories About Confidence Naming—the April post, with the full origin stories for each of the phrases mentioned above.

    He Wrote Back—the earlier post about Jared writing back after “Rescue Me.”

  • Broke the Seal

    I had brought a 12 oz. bottle of water. Klarbrunn.

    It seems like lately, all sorts of different lids do not twist off easily anymore, and I was once the kind of person that people went to to get lids taken off. I was so strong. Now, I struggle. I was about to struggle to open my water.

    Out of the blue, I realized, “I don’t need to sit here and be embarrassed and struggle and look like an idiot.” I just said one word: “Help,” as I handed my bottle to Tim. He accepted the bottle, and with one twist, he broke the seal for me, and handed the bottle back to me. Problem solved.

    And I don’t know why. Suddenly, this little tiny gesture is like a whole microcosm of being in therapy: I hand him my bottle, he opens it, and now I can drink from it.

    Everyone should drink more water.

    Now that I just said that, this sounds totally even worse and ridiculous than wanting to put the moment into the gratitude record. Anyway, whatever, let’s definitely mark a gratitude that Tim opened my water bottle.

    And maybe what I liked the best about it was that I only had to say one word, and the rest of it was just an unspoken exchange back and forth. Complete. Does a single word followed by exact actions qualify as “forthright communication”? Thinking back on the moment, the emotions make me want to cry. Yeah. No tears, no watered eyes, but if I thought about it just the right way, I could get some tears to drop.

    Six more gratitudes happened that same hour. I recorded all of them. Only one repeat.

  • NEXT

    Not that communication with Philip, nor finances, nor sleep, nor reasonable dog… are done. What is next is anxiety. Fingernail biting is so bad now, I can’t even open the pull top on cans of wet cat food for Max every morning. The temporary work-around is grabbing a spoon. Sure, that works, but really, that is not the solution. All anxiety can’t be canceled with one easy fix. But maybe there is 1.1 fix toward one awkward result of anxiety. I notice other people’s hands and nails. I’m sure mine stand out as bad to others.

    I don’t want the spoon to be the long-term fix.

    The right fix involves noticing. But noticing requires noticing. How do you teach yourself to notice the movement of the hand toward the danger?

    OHHHHH. I know I’m going to hear this super simple instruction that sounds simple but isn’t actually in the moment. There isn’t one. The body of anxiety just finds somewhere else to attack.

  • Chase—Part 4: My Original ESA

    1988 Wisconsin license plate

    Chase was a companion that stayed with me the longest. He died the summer of 1996.

    I branded my entire internet presence on my Rottweiler. Even before the internet handles, I registered for a personalized Wisconsin license plate. 1987. RTTWLR. Used this abbreviation on eWorld and gmail. When I switched to a real Internet Service Provider, I asked for chase to be part of my email address. And is still today.

    Hindsight can lie. Yet, I believe I am sure that raising and training Chase kept me steady. The hours of training that earned us degrees and certificates also provided mental health. I was accused of loving my dog more than my son. Admittedly Chase was my first baby boy. I didn’t neglect Philip. He was included on purpose such that I didn’t leave him with sitters. Chase loved and protected Philip. At trials, Chase and I in the ring together, he always knew where Philip was situated.

    Chase was my first permanent photography model. I created multiple personal graphic design logos in his image. He inspired me to commit a crime: I stole a full-size wood road sign, Utility Work Ahead. In the midst of training for his UD, the impulse was greater than the risk.

    An ESA is emotional support. Chase was mine when he was the only body waiting for me in the truck outside the abortion clinic. He went with me on the 1000 mile road trip when I freaked out at work and ran away over a small issue.

    I have a habit of expecting people in my life to replace my dog. (Kevin. Brendan).

  • Chase—Part 3: The Radio Flyer Was Essential

    Rottweilers don’t know they are not lap dogs. Chase would back up to the couch and when his butt touched the cushions, he would keep backing up until his whole butt was sitting on the couch, front legs just standing there. He’d do the same on your lap..

    Chase didn’t eat the baby. Toddler Philip would crawl up to Chase and take rawhide bones from his mouth; Chase just looked forlorn and spoke with his eyes saying, “he took my bone.”

    One birthday I bought Rick a red toy remote control race car. Off leash, Chase would chase the car up the street, down the sidewalk, and turn circles in the driveway.

    There was the essential purchase of the Radio Flyer Town & Country wagon for Philip.

    At the BKC show, a vendor had the tongue to fit that wagon. I bought a RED carting harness. Chase trained easily—unleashed, go/stop-wait at crossings, called back for wide U-turns. We dressed the outfit like a chuck wagon with Philip in cowboy gear, or 4th of July flags..

    After the CDX, Chase learned every UD routine. but he hated the competition. Every time, every show, something different would get messed up. We stopped going. I knew he could do every part, but we found agility instead. He loved racing the obstacle course with me. And he thrived at carting, earning his certificate.

    Before and after Philip was born, Chase was my answer to social anxiety. People could talk to me about my dog and I was able to relax. Chase pulling Philip in the wagon was an awesome conversation starter.