Freelancer's Office

I’ve had a long series of ups and downs, as anyone that has watched my websites has likely noticed. It has been a nasty battle with depression that has, for far too long, caused me to experience failure after failure in trying to get my work back up to the level that it was in early 2008.

A lot of the time I had not even realized what I was feeling was depression, I just had no desire to really do anything more than I needed to do in any given day and pushed people away from me. Dark parts of my mind whispered that they hated me, that no one wanted to be around me, and in my depression I had no way to fight back – particularly when I am in a continual battle to not hide away from everyone and live my life inside my house. Yes, I hide it fairly well, but I am only a few panic attacks shy of being a shut-in. I steadfastly refuse to let myself become one, however, so even if it is just sitting on my porch to sip a cup of tea I make myself step outside when I find myself thinking that I could just live my life inside.

This inclination toward hermitage makes it very easy for me to listen when the voices say no one likes me, and that makes it rather hard to battle depression that leaves me feeling miserable and like my time would be better spent laying in bed than working. What is bad is that despite the fact that I knew that I was having issues with depression, have been battling it for years, I had not actually realized just how much it is affecting my work until I realized that I had not yet got my work back on track. I have been working, and making money at it, but when I step back and look at just how much I am making, it is just a bit over what the cost of my websites are. I am making enough that my sites are not costing me anything out of my own pocket (which is good since I can’t pay hosting companies with lint), but my sites are far from supporting me.

Part of that is my fault. No, it is entirely my fault. I let depression and feelings of low self-worth affect my ability to work. I allowed hackers to attack one of my websites when I was at the bottom of a depression and they left it in complete ruin. And yes, I do mean complete ruin. It was this website, which I am fairly certain has been blocked by a lot of search engines thanks to some bastard that hacked it and left some very vulgar and sexually explicit trash all over the site. I had not known anything was wrong with my own site until I hauled myself far enough above the depression clouds to start trying to work and realized that Google had banned the site from its advertising program.

My initial impulse was to ask them to reinstate the site, which I had torn down entirely and rebuilt from scratch, but then I decided that I should wait until I had rebuilt it some. And then the depression crept back in and I was left, once again, neglecting to get things done for I don’t know how long.

I am through with that. Or at least I am in a good enough mood today that I am telling myself I am through with it. I want to rebuild my sites, get them back up and moving along how they are supposed to be, and get back to working at a level that I am not only keeping my business from failing, but it is starting to turn enough of a profit to allow me to meet my bills once again.

So, I am going to start with a few websites that I have been managing to keep afloat, then expand outward from those once they are running smoothly. It is going to be a long slow rebuild, but I am determined that I am no longer going to allow depression to affect my work.