Left-Brain, Right-Brain, Einstein

Friday . . . It’s been one week since I’ve stopped my Wellbutrin XL prescription, but I can still tell it is in my system because my sinuses are totally clear. My nostril passages are like wide-open doors versus their normally closed and cramped shafts allowing the air flow of a Utah mine cave-in. And unintended allergy relief is a documented side-effect of this quite powerful anti-depressant.

I had a dream about the ex-Mrs.Dr.Malamud, Hanna-Marie, today. In it I was attempting to explain to her why I hadn’t treated her better when we were married, and my dream self thought back to my real self screaming out “I didn’t know! I DIDN’T know!” for day after week after year and responded to her with, “I didn’t know.” In the dream I felt there was a possibility we might re-marry. I awoke feeling warm and hopeful. Of course when The Valley of the Sun has just set a new record of the number of days over 110F degrees anyone is likely to wake up feeling ‘warm’.

I’m reading a challenging book about changing behavior. It’s so challenging that I sometimes shove it aside for days–but it isn’t as challenging as the textbook I’m reading to learn the programming language of all internet blogs.

This psychology book insists that our right brain never matures past the emotions of a three-year old, while our left brain, that analytical fact-storing part, is the adult. The writer is a Ph.D. in psychology and she claims that our right brain is often emotionally damaged during its first thirty-six months of air-breathing life. Injuries that must consciously be so slowly healed and many times be worked around by the goal-seeking left-brain.

Note: if you are right-handed your left-brain is your analytical ‘adult’ half and your right-brain is your emotional-infant half. Persons who have organically chosen to be left handed have the brain halves functions reversed.

My left-brain is actually rebelling at the thought of having to please my three-year old right-brain to get its cooperation in getting anything done. I’m changing the downward-since-1991-slope of my life. I think, not knowing better, because of its reign over my emotions (which explains my multi-year extremely passionate and destructive reactions to my wife’s divorce decision) my infant right-brain has convinced my soul that it is “ME”. All of me. And that’s just not true. Any longer.