I haven't written on here in quite a while, so I figured I'd go ahead and post something. A lot has happened since my last post, which was sometime last year. About six months ago, I broke up with someone that I had been dating for a long time. Unfortunately, it was a bad relationship, and I stayed in it for about two years too long. This made it difficult for things between us to settle down until about last week, when he finally agreed to stop contacting me. I'm still struggling with everything that happened, and I finally opened up about it to a friend. This helped me realize that I should stop blaming myself and move on. I have a meeting with my therapist tomorrow, and I haven't seen her in almost two months. We left off on a really positive note because that week was one of the best weeks of my life. I let myself have a night off to go see an amazing concert, and I got a research position at the med school at my university. My therapist will probably be surprised when I go back to see her, and she will see that my mood has completely changed. Or maybe she won't be surprised. She could get that kind of thing all the time. I don't know. But anyway, the week after I stopped seeing her, my aunt died suddenly (natural causes). I am usually very good at handling stress like this, but I felt like I got hit by a ton of bricks. I prepare myself for tragedy all the time, but I did not see this one coming. We found out after she died that she was secretly a hoarder and kept a diary of how unhappy she was. This was like putting salt in the wound, and I feel guilty that nobody saw how sick she was. She kind of annoyed me at times (everyone has a family member like that), so I started to distance myself from her. This makes me feel horrible because I know I should have been better to her. But it also got me thinking about how I deal with the rest of my family. My sister was born with a rare genetic disease that makes it a miracle that she's alive today. My whole life, I've been preparing for the worst by not letting myself get too attached. I realized after my aunt died that this is a terrible way of coping, and I'm trying my best to fix it. She doesn't know who I am or anything, so it doesn't matter to her, but it still bothers me. When my siblings and I were younger, it was really difficult to cope with a sister who seemed to be slipping away in front of our eyes. Everyone in the family had a different way of dealing with it, and my brother's method involved taking out all of his anger on me. Because of this, I have a lot of resentment toward him, and I have recently decided that it is time to stop talking to him. Sometimes, it's best to just cut ties and walk away. It doesn't really make me sad, though, because pretty much the only emotion I feel towards him is anger. I wrote a letter to him that I won't actually give him, but it helped me get my feelings out. I'm bringing it to my therapist tomorrow, so we'll see what she thinks about it.

On another note, I think I suddenly decided that I might want to be pre-med. I'm really interested in neuroscience, and I think I want to be a neurologist. My dad got in a motorcycle accident last summer, and we recently found out that he has spinal chord damage, and there isn't much else they can do for him in terms of relieving pain and other symptoms. Maybe this was the inspiration for my sudden career plans, but I can't be sure.

I just realized how incredibly scatter-brained this post was. Sorry about that. But it helped to just write, even if it's really random.