BIG NEWS ALERT: Stay tuned in the next couple of days! If you love to read and are interested in going on a journey with me!

Please continue to keep sharing this website with your friends and family and help me share this story with people that could benefit from knowing they aren’t alone. Please consider helping aclottedjourney.com also, see below for details on that! Enjoy Part 20 of my story, Living Under the Influence: Serotonin Edition!

The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely.

Louisa May Alcott

There are so many reasons in this world to be happy and full of gratefulness each and every day. This part of my story I have such a struggle telling because I am so very worried that those closest to me will ever feel like they didn’t give me an environment to be happy in. They did. I have an outstanding family/group of friends that would do anything for me. Just because someone is surrounded by supportive and happy people, doesn’t mean that the person surrounded will be happy. I have learned many things from the idols in my life like Robin Williams, and that is one of those lessons. Someone can be the most outwardly happy person in the world, but still suffer from the demons inside the skull. Someone can have the purest of hearts and still be in the muddiest of mindsets. If anything by reading my story and writings, I hope that you will check on not only the obviously struggling in your life but also those who just may be better at living in that façade.

That month I waited for the medication to take effect within my skull. Day after day I just kept waiting and… nothing. No matter how hard I tried to think in my head that I felt something starting to change my thought process, nothing seemed to change. Silence at the end of the receiver. Silence at the end of the input. I remember messaging my doctor here at the clinic and he told me to keep holding on and wait a couple more weeks to notice change. Interestingly enough, even to this very day I cannot tell you the exact moment that things seemed to change but it started small and made monumental domino movements within my life.

Serotonin within our bodies is a key hormone that stabilizes mood, feelings of well-being and happiness. Needless to say, it is extremely important. Although this is not the end of my journey with mental health, I am happy to say that I do think my brain was living its best life with all of the extra serotonin laying around. I never realized how excellent I could be at some of the things in my life until I started having that passion again. I am not saying that the medication is the sole responsible party for me feeling better, as I was determined to eventually be off of this medication (I am so excited to tell you about this journey), but I can’t deny that it helped. When I think of saving up serotonin within our bodies I think of a savings account in a bank. At first the small savings in the beginning don’t mean much, but one day you will get that statement and not be able to believe the saving you did. One day the light switch finally catches the electricity and you feel that happiness. You feel.

One day I decided that I was going to start running. For those of you that know me and my athletic habits, this should still surprise you because running is something that I have always wanted to be good at but never had. One day I started playing my guitar again and really focusing on learning the basics all over. Something subtle had changed but left me starting to exercise my ability to move about the cabin of life and get back into my hobbies. I started having that meaning again. I started living like I was going to live for a while. I will preach this until the day I am six feet under the ground, make sure that you do something in your life that means something to you. I know that not everyone is inspired about their work, but at least participate in something at home that gives you something to work on. Something to train on. It brings meaning to your days, at least it did for me. That meaning brought a spark of passion back for me from my deep wave of depression. That passion made me happy. I stayed in this growing happiness for the weeks that followed. During those weeks, I rediscovered my love for motivation/inspiration/self-help books and teachings. Maybe you think I never lost any of my love for those things, but it wasn’t the same. It gave me some much-needed time to reflect, and it definitely put me into a healthy (or healthier) mindset to do that pondering of life.

You deserve to be happy. You deserve to live a life that you are excited about. Don’t let others make you forget that.

Unknown

I have always been an even-tempered person that has a lot of the flaws that most humans have. One of the flaws that has always made me the most vulnerable is my constant need to be an empath. I say it makes me the most vulnerable because it is one of the most important things that I have came to love about myself, but I realize now that it put me into a cycle that isn’t winnable. When you allow yourself to embrace the feelings around you so much, you can very easily lose sight in life on what your “why” is. When you allow yourself to be so easily swayed by the feelings around you, you are basing your happiness on those around you. Simply this is not best practice in life, because the only thing that you can rely on is that you will never be able to tell or control what other people think and that isn’t reliable. Life is unreliable. Family can hurt you. Friends can hurt you. Stress in other people’s life can hurt you. Lucky for us though, unreliable situations can be used to our advantage in life with the right mindset.

So, you may be thinking in your head, “Alex, if I am also this kind of person what should I do?”. This is the start of my journey of finding myself again. I will tell you what I did after that clot ravaged my ego. Keep reading over the next couple of posts and I will keep elaborating. If this isn’t you at all, I still hope to tell you my side of the story on this journey because I have found that in life I have been helped by people that are not like me at all the most. Diversity in thoughts and opinions are important to a life like blood is to a body.

Being on a journey back from a dark place I realize what that blood clot had taken from me. I wasn’t the same Alex on this side of that blood clot. I wasn’t the same Alex on this side of that breakup. I wasn’t the same Alex on this side of depression. I had many more battles in the coming weeks and this was just a brief intermission where I truly forgot about everything in life besides my mental health. My next blood check up was in the coming weeks. I was so very worried that all of my progress would be shattered. How would I handle that?

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

Please consider helping A Clotted Journey keep moving forward!

I have loved writing on here so much that I can foresee myself doing this for a long time, I hope you will all continue to support me and help me spread my message! You can do this by first, subscribing below and to all of the social media accounts for brand new content right away. And then second, if you can, help the website in other ways! If you choose to donate to the page, I will donate a portion of the contribution (you tell me how much you’d like to be donated or I will just do 50%) to the American Society of Hematology and the remainder I will put towards helping the website. I have many plans coming up for aclottedjourney.com and I need your help to keep spreading my story and expanding the type of content I can bring to you. If you want to see if I need anything specific the link to my WISH LIST is here. Click HERE to make a difference!