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Dear stress,

Lets break up.

Love, I wish

ME

There are times in life where you feel like the world is taking you on a journey via the longest possible path. Going around the world on foot path, waiting for a gift on a holiday when you are growing up path, etc. Often while in the thick of it all, you don’t appreciate it. But on the outside of the small looking-glass view that we have at that time of stress and fracture, we do develop. One of the hardest things to see in people struggling is when this development is for the worse in life, such an opportunity squandered. This, unfortunately, is a tossup in individuals that go through such challenging times. You either go through something or grow from something. The spark that inspired me to start this journey of telling the world about my life involves this situation. I know how it is to just go through the motions through one of the moments in life that wants to kill you. I know how it is to feel like there is absolutely no reason to hope or be resilient. I want to help the group of individuals that also are feeling that pain. I want to make sure that if there is life, there is hope. If there is life, there is a chance to grow and make someone’s world just a little bit brighter, even if that world isn’t always your world. Like a wise Will Smith once said, “If you aren’t making someone else’s life better, you’re wasting your time”. We all can be a catalyst in this world. The most vivacious part of being a catalyst in life, is you can be utilized at multiple different steps of the process, life. At certain times you are at the beginning of a reaction or hard time, and you will most certainly be relying on the elements or loved ones around you to hold your reaction through to equilibrium. Other times you will find yourself being the only key to someone’s or your happiness. The only spark to trudge through a process. The only flame to hopefully stir the coals enough in your soul to burst into a mighty flame again.

Stress is the inability to decide what’s important.

My journey once again had put me into a position of not truly being sure whether or not I should invest any of my time into the things I care about because I wasn’t quite sure if I would be alive to enjoy any of the fruits of my labor. I pushed through the tasks that I needed to, still trying to excel in school, still trying to understand heartbreak, still understanding why it seemed everything was going to go downhill in my life, still understanding a multitude of things. I remember taking that first gasp of air waking up that morning to get my blood drawn at 6:30 AM at the clinic. It was a dark canvas outside of my window, and I felt just as empty. I had no emotion besides, “HERE MY LUCK ENDS” in my head. This impending doom had started bellowing in my soul at the start of all of this but seemed to re-intensify now being back at the clinic for my blood tests even after the small victory at the dermatologist. I was positive that my journey would soon be coming to an end, my anxiety was through the roof and I was too naive to understand the triggers that would lead me into depression.

If you feel like you’re losing everything, remember trees lose their leaves every year, and they stand tall and wait for better days to come.

I drank my usual huge glass of water as I usually do in the morning and slummed my way down to the infamous place that I was well acquainted with. I didn’t even care to put any effort in to how I look, my pride left again. All I could muster was a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt, this was enough to someone who had nothing to be excited about that day. That needle went into my skin and it felt like, nothing. I was so used to that pain of getting blood drawn that I couldn’t even have the feeling of hurt with that. The thing that did surprise me was how many tubes of blood they took from my veins. It seemed to be about 20 tubes of blood that they took from me, some of the tubes were dubbed as “research”, something that I must have signed up for in the haze of my journey. I left that curtained off exam-room with more than just a gauze wrap around my elbow. I had a realization that soon enough I would get a beep on my phone that would show me some of the preliminary results of my blood tests. I never got a beep. I checked and the results never showed up like they usually did before my appointments. This terrified me. All I can say is a moment that terrifies an anxious person is never a good moment. Hopefully all of you anxious people out there can relate.

Don’t stress the could haves. If it should have, it would have.

My appointment was in the afternoon that day, many hours after this blood was drawn. I sat in the waiting room for that appointment with an impatience I couldn’t believe. I was so positive this news would be bad, and I needed to know for some reason. Something I wouldn’t learn until later on in life was the pleasantries that presented themselves in ignorance. The pleasantries you are given when not stressing over something you don’t know yet.

The news wasn’t great. The news was yet again, inconclusive, and worrisome to some of the world’s best hematologists. My blood results seemed to be becoming more abnormal but not abnormal enough to start any chemotherapy at that time they thought. They weren’t sure what would help my prognosis. Do they start an aggressive treatment now and hope that gives me a longer lifespan? Or do we wait and possibly give the disease a chance to present itself and become more pronounced? Both had risks, and both had anxiety. There choice at that point came from hours of deliberation between colleagues not only from this world-renown clinic, but from other giants in the industry as well. They didn’t know what the outcome was going to come out of this, but they didn’t assure me that I would be living a long life. They told me quite the opposite. They told me in their jargon that these diseases often move quickly and swiftly, leaving no one left standing often. I was a timebomb that they didn’t know how to diffuse just yet.

I can’t even begin to convey to you all what type of long-term stress this started in my life. I have learned to cope with it that is for sure. But I am so very excited to tell you how I started structuring my life after this bad news.

Until next time ACJ Nation! Peace, love, all the above.

-Alex

Thank you all so much from the bottom of my heart for all of your support!

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