Hello, World! It has been a long time since I decided to write publicly.  In the past, I had a creative blog where I shared a lot of intimate, personal experiences.  Ultimately, it felt like it was getting a little too personal and private to keep sharing.  Yet here I am again…writing always finds me.  I’ve been writing since I was a was a child, and have dozens of journals to prove it.  I’ve written about my fears, my traumas, toxic relationships, and darkest feelings.  I guess in the end, I’m trying to heal, and maybe help someone else along the way.  You see, when you are going through trauma your mind automatically thinks you are alone.  You are the only one feeling this way, you are on your own with nothing and nobody.  I’ve experienced these feelings since I was 17 and had a complete mental breakdown.  I went through ups and downs since then, going on and off medications and therapy to help me.  Around the time when my brother was “ill” and passed away, I stopped sleeping and literally did not rest for years.  This has continued to this day.  It has been the cause of subsequent breakdowns and times I could not even function.  Anyway, skipping over the other traumas because it would be too much for one post, I finally got married this past fall, something I’ve been dreaming about and wanting so badly for so long.  It didn’t come without its own trauma, but again, that’s for another post.  When I got engaged, we found out my other brother had a serious disease stemming from a bad gene.  He had cancer when we were little, so life has been especially unkind.  A month later, my other living brother, a super fit, healthy firefighter, experienced a sudden cardiac death and is luckily shocked back to life.  We find out, he has the bad gene too.  On a side note, the same thing happened to my cousin who had a heart transplant in his early 20s.  Needless to say, my family has had a HELL of a time.  I recently got back into prayer and the Bible, and would read it almost every night hoping God heard me.  Since I am recently married and in my 30s, we wanted to start having kids and with everything going on in my family, I went to get a genetic carrier screening.  I figured, since this thing is 50/50, and my brother is dead, and the other 2 have it, it must miss me then right? Wrong.  I just found out this weekend that I am a carrier for this heinous gene.  My whole world just feels like it has flipped upside down.  I am negative for 511 things, and THIS is the one that comes back? Sure, there are expensive and traumatizing solutions to this, but who the hell wants to go through that? And speaking of sleep, I’ve gotten none of that and at the same time, I’m trying to switch to a safer medication for pregnancy.  I feel like I should still try naturally since it is not guaranteed that the baby would have it, it just scares me because of how dominant it seems to be running in my family.  I did not sleep at all, I barely have an appetite, and I can’t stop this from running circles around my head.  I wish it didn’t consume me, but I’m petrified.