Adventures in Clotting, part II.

Emotions are pretty brutal for me. I don't like them - I find them messy, inconvenient, and useless. They've never really served me well and they don't do anything. There's no action in them, no solution, just feeling. They're fine for other people to have, and I respect other people's connection to them, but I'm a fucking gangster and I don't have time for that shit.

No one really tells you that one of the hardest parts of recovering from an illness is all the emotional baggage and shit that it brings up. You worry about how your body will function - how you'll breathe, how you'll stand the pain, how you'll be able to go back to your day-to-day operations. You never think about how it's going to make you feel and the emotional toll that having a failing body can take on a person. My first pulmonary embolism destroyed me. It caused a major upheaval in my life - I mean, I moved 3,000 miles for Christ's sake! It was gut-wrenching and terrible. I cried every night for like 2 months, terrified that I was going to die of a stroke in the middle of the night. My mother called me every day at noon to make sure I wasn't in the middle of a mental breakdown. I didn't eat for like six weeks and lost a ton of weight, to the point where my then-boyfriend would get super concerned and practically force-feed me. It was not a pleasant time. I don't ever want to go back to that space, and as a result, I think I may be acting a little bit recklessly.

In the 18 days since my episode, I've gone out 9 times and I've gotten insanely drunk at least 4 or 5 times. I've said yes to nearly every invitation I've gotten to go out and do things. I know why I'm doing this - I figure if I go go go and keep drinking, keep hanging out, keep socializing, I won't ever get to that place where I'm depressed. The first night after getting back from the hospital, I had a mini-meltdown, complete with tears, yelling, and all sorts of other craziness. I just felt sorry for myself and truly felt so alone. I'm a really strong person, but some things just break you down and that night I was not in a good place. I don't ever want to be in that place again. So I drink, I party with my friends, I do all the things that I probably shouldn't be doing just to stop up that empty space that exists inside me. I don't really know how to cope with this. Maybe therapy? Maybe meditation? Maybe yoga? I don't fucking know, but I need to get a handle on it before I make things worse.