Warning: This post is long and mostly personal. I won’t blame you if you decide to go check Facebook instead.

This post is a long time coming. I really got the wind knocked out of me. Thing is, I didn’t even know it at the time. I’m stubborn like that. I’ve been working online full time for about 14 years. Either as a web developer, sysadmin, publisher, co-owner, development manager, blogger, consultant, pretty much anything and everything web related. Even before that I worked with computers, fixing, upgrading, networking, that whole deal. You may notice a trend. I love this stuff. I’m about to celebrate my 10 year anniversary with Aeryn, and we are also about to celebrate another anniversary: 5 years without cancer. See, Aeryn was diagnosed with Cancer almost 5 years ago. It took months to diagnose and then another several months of operations, treatments and the side effects. I worked through it all, and took off as often as I could to be with her. As medical bills mounted, family had already been helping out… I had to do something and so I sold all my personal sites. I didn’t make a dime. Every bit of it went to medical bills, but it got us out of debt and let me spend more time with her. Totally worth it and I’d do it again in a heart beat.

That’s where things really went wrong, and only recently have I started to get over this. Without my own sites, I got out of the practice of working on things daily. Sure, my skills kept sharp by doing it at work, where it’s also my full time day job. But at night, I just couldn’t get on the computer. I was afraid, no, terrified that if I left her side that, God forbid, I might come back and find her… I can’t even say it.

To make matters worse, my step mom was also battling Acute Myeloid Leukemia. I was donating Plasma once or twice a month. My mom died just a few years earlier and I was afraid I was about to lose my second mom too. And to add injury to the insult, I developed a mystery back problem. Tests, MRIs, Physical Therapy and lots of docs and no one could figure it out. They started treating me for pain, which meant regular steroid injections + oral steroids and pain pills. The steroid treatments gave me about a weeks worth of relief and it was sweet. The pain pills caused more problems than they helped so I gave up on those. I could barely move without severe pain, I’d say about an 7-8 out of 10 pain. Some days I had to walk with a cane and sitting at my computer all day was not going to happen. I couldn’t even sleep in my bed, I had to sleep on the couch, something about it really helped my back. This lasted over a year. One day, I woke up and it was finally gone. I’m not ashamed to say, I cried. Nothing ever felt so good.

To complicate matters worse, I wasn’t just taking care of me and Aeryn, but helping out my family. A couple of them, one with kids, was even living with me. It’s hard enough starting your own family, I did’t realize how much harder helping out others would make that. Not that I expected the helping to last as long as it did either. I’ve always felt a huge obligation, or maybe guilt and felt like I’ve always had to help out. I sometimes forget that if it’s hurting me, I’m not really helping anyone at all. Something I had to change, and now we’ve been living alone for almost a year, like we did the first few years of our marriage.

I tried to get back to my life several times, but I guess I wasn’t ready. I ended up failing, miserably. It seemed like every time I’d start, something bad would happen. It happened enough that I was pretty gun shy about trying again. I let people down and I didn’t communicate just how bad things were because frankly, I didn’t know myself. I stopped working out and stopped doing pretty much anything other than go to work. Even there I struggled. I was emotionally a wreck and mentally burned out. Only a few close friends might have known something was wrong. A couple years ago I went to my doctor and got on Paxil. And it worked, sorta. It helped me just not worry about all my problems. I could care less that work and bills were piling up. Or about much for that matter. It was a nice break, and one I think my mind needed. But it went on too long, and it didn’t help with the one thing I wanted it to the most, getting back to my normal life. Working out, creating cool things, interacting with friends and generally, enjoying life. So I consulted my doc, weened myself off them over several weeks as directed and I felt pretty good.

Then it was time for repairs. Lots of damage has been done. It’s taken almost a year to really understand what was wrong, what I was afraid of and except it and move on. Or, I should say, moving on. I’m still working through it, but I feel much more like myself. I’m getting creative and motivated again, and I just feel excited about life. There’s still plenty to stress about, but we’ll deal with it because we know it’ll pass. It has to, right? Everything does.

Now I’m starting over, in almost every way. All my sites are gone, or withered and faded away. But that’s also a good thing. I’m excited about a fresh start. I’ve been doing a little bit of Wordpress consulting, like installs, plugin installs, theme installs, tweaks, etc. I so want to do the code/work on a huge multi-user blog. I’d like to do some more consulting. I love working with people in the online space. I’ve also been working on a project for my friend Patrick, which I’m way behind on. Luckily, I’ve been on a roll and I’m making up for lost time. I’m getting close to 40% done and I’m building up speed. And it’s pretty cool, I think and I can’t wait to see it in action.

Next up is trying to figure out where to go from here. I really want to put together a couple of nice sites, and I’m very interested in partnering up with people, doing some guest blogging and just networking and reconnecting with friends. That’s what I really love about doing all this anyway. I’m just stoked, and it’s been a while.

If you made it this far, thanks. I don’t usually do these kinds of posts, but I thought anyone who might be interested deserved to know, and if it helps someone else out there who might have gone through this sort of thing, even better. Thanks again.

-Chris