Tonight’s Lesson: My counseling sessions started as an assessment to see if my clinical depression had progressed to bipolar. It was determined by a team of excellent doctors that I do not classify as having bipolar disorder, however, I was open to taking the test because of an interesting thing that someone told me early in the game. Everyone has two poles. Technically, everyone is bipolar. The difference between an individual diagnosed with bipolar disorder and the common, everyday person is the extreme depth at which a high or low is experienced and the inability to move past that feeling without a pharmacological regimen. Tonight’s Update: It’s Friday. I’ve completed my first week of IOP. It sucked. It wasn’t bad because of the gut-wrenching emotional horror that was endured while reliving my childhood. Rather, it sucked because I feel like I’m not getting much out of the process. I expected IOP to be a group of people discovering themselves based on sharing their personal stories and working through their battles with depression, anxiety, stress, addiction, alcoholism, etc. with each other. I expected it to be a group of people working through one problem at a time in order to help each individual develop realizations about themselves that they would not have come to on their own. Instead, it has been what I believe most would consider to be elementary education. On Monday, they focused on stress management. On Wednesday (the session which I could not attend,) they focused on cognitive behavioral thinking. Today, they focused on relationships and boundaries. These are all important skill sets for everyone to learn, but I feel as though I’m wasting my time. I’ve already spent two years in college pursuing a psychology degree. I’ve had a very successful IT career for a decade and a half, and I’m now transitioning to an even more stressful career in the fire and rescue service. I have counseled many other people on how to stand up for their own rights and not allow others to take advantage of them. Simply put, I feel like I already have the education. So where does that leave me? I haven’t given up on it yet, and I still have another week to go. I haven’t stopped going to individual therapy, but the next session is a few weeks away. My medications have stabilized, and I am actually feeling a lot better than I have been over the past few weeks. I haven’t had suicidal or overwhelming thoughts of depression at all this week. Tomorrow, I will take the test to join Baltimore County as a career Firefighter/EMT, and I will test for Baltimore City in the next couple of weeks. After tomorrow’s test, I will go staff the medic unit and squad while the Blue Angels perform in the surrounding area. It’s the 200th anniversary of the Star-Spangled Banner, so all of the major cities around me will be lit up with festivities all weekend long. Here’s to flashing red and white while wearing blue during a patriotic celebratory weekend. All I have to do is get through the coming week and then I’ll be back to my classes again!