I don’t want blank extra lines to be removed in posts.

For some reason (maybe its a “feature”?) when I go to make a post in WordPress with extra blank lines the formatting tool takes them out and closes the gaps between paragraphs.

For example, if I made in the tool the post

“Hello.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Hello from down here”

(pretend those “.” are not there as this thing auto formats the blank lines too, which is why I had to edit this post to include them”

WordPress will auto format that to be

“Hello.

Hello from down here”

I have tried forcing in br tags in the html and even that is discarded. How do I keep WordPress from auto formatting things?