Fraying Edges | Depression Help

I Find It Difficult To Communicate When I Am Under Pressure

I have made quite a few online friends in the last year or so. Some work online themselves, or are bloggers like me, others visit forums I go to and others read Fraying Edges, or one of my other blogs, and have kept in contact with me as a result.

During that time, I have found most of my online friends to be interesting people, often very different to me and in a few instances very similar. I am genuinely interested in what they have to say and, if they need help and it’s in my power to offer help and/advice, then I am only too willing to do so… most of the time.

But at other times, I just cannot communicate in a friendly manner. The nature of my life and the way I attack it (and I guess ‘attack’ is the correct word…), means that I tend to suffer stress and burnout a lot. And at times like these, I am not the nicest person to know. I will be over critical, sarcastic and sometimes downright rude. To make a comment on your blog, or send you an email at that time, would put a dark cloud over your day, no question.

And I must stress that it will not be anything you have said or done, just the way I am feeling at that point in time. At those times, I am saving all the kind thoughts and actions I can just about manage to produce for my family, because, if I don’t do this, they will bear the brunt of my feelings and that would not be fair at all.

Does that make me a ‘bad’ person to know? Well, if you want someone who is always kind to you; who will always respond, no matter how down they are feeling themselves, then I guess it does. But if you prefer to know someone honest; who gives you a genuine reason for their lack of communication, rather than making a comment or sending you an email filled with ‘off the top of my head’ worthless platitudes (because to give my real feelings at that time would be incorrect, hurtful, and serve no good purpose), then you have me.

You may not like me for the way I am, but hopefully you will understand where I am coming from.

You see, over the last two or three weeks, I seem to have been fighting an almost losing battle to continue working online (and I say ‘almost’, because losing is not in my vocabulary when it comes to making a living to help keep my family safe and secure). I have had hosting problems; ISP failures; scam artists trying their damndest to get the better of me; and sponsors changing their ways of working in the middle of a campaign, throwing everything off balance; to mention just a few ‘trials’ I have had to overcome to keep up and running. In the midst of all this, we have had a massive late summer heatwave which sucked the energy out of most of us and led to water shortages and scrub fires near the village, causing panic, alarm and more upheavals. And, most daunting of all, I also have more to do to sort out the aftermath of legal matters concerning my Mum’s death in June, which brings the whole, totally distressing event back with great clarity.

At least the other concerns take my mind off of the real one (the last one), I suppose…

I must admit I have been very tempted to reach for that (rather out-of-date) bottle of anti-depressants in the hope that starting on them again will help me keep sane. But I know it won’t…

So that’s where I stand at the moment and why you may find me a little uncommunicative of late…

Just trying to keep my head above water (when there is any….) and trying not to put too much of a cloud on anyone else’s day.

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Well, I had Hosting Stress and now I am having Internet Stress. In fact, as I write this post, I am not online at all, just using a blog poster and saving it until we are online again… whenever that will be…

As anyone who has been reading Fraying Edges Depression Help for a while knows. We live in rural Spain. However, we are not Spanish by birth, but English, and still getting used to the ‘intricacies’ of life here after living here for three or so years.

Spanish is not our first language (in fact, in school it was not our second either (that was French, as far as basic GCSE level French went…), so when things go wrong here, it can get just a little stressful trying to sort them out.

Added to that, we do not have a local family connection to call on to help, as is the custom with people who have lived here since birth.

The only Internet connection available to us here is ‘rural ADSL’. Until recently, it was just above dial-up speed, but a few weeks ago, we got the ‘big boost’ (with a very big advertising campaign to go with it) and now we can actually get download speeds of 250k or over. Doesn’t sound much I know to those on fast connections, but to us, both working online, it was like paradise itself. That is until the phone lines went down…

Phone lines and internet connections here go down quite a lot, but they are usually put right within a couple of hours or so… but not this time. The usual stressful mobile phone call to Telefonica (translating rapid-fire Spanish is no joke) produced a mended telephone connection the next day… but no Internet. So we phoned again, only to be told that all was fine their end… so it must be something local which required an engineer…

The Internet here is not considered a major thing. The locals use it, but no one apart from us uses it for work, so everyone is just happy that the telephone lines have been reconnected and think it’s just a ’strange English thing’ that we would need the Internet so much.

As I sit typing this, I am waiting for the engineer to call. We have been told 48 hours at the most, but experience has shown us that 48 hours in Spain can be stretched a little further than that… And when he calls he will talk in Spanish (after all, it is his language) and tell us how to go about fixing ‘el problema’. This will involve more rapid fire Spanish, our very slow and halting Spanish and lots of sign language and eventually, fingers tightly crossed, ‘el problema’ may just be fixed…

In the meantime, I have websites to make, link building to do, sponsor links to update, and a million other things which cannot be done without an Internet connection. In fact, I have a list a mile long of things which had to be done ‘yesterday’.

So I am feeling just a little stressed right now!

Stress-filled post over. Let’s hope that normal service will be resumed…eventually…

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Or Why Counting Sheep Is Not Always A Good Thing!

When I was a kid, around the age of about 5 or 6, I used to suffer from Night Terrors. If anyone has suffered from night terrors themselves, they will know just how awful they can be. I literally used to think I was going mad… and I reckon my parents may have wondered about that too.

In actual fact, night terrors are not that unusual in children. Most of the time they occur when the child has a raised temperature and the sufferer usually ‘grows out of it’ in time.

If anyone is interested, this is a link to an article on Night Terrors on Wikepedia (it describes them in adults as well). It relates a little to how I felt, but, as with most intense emotional experiences, these are subjective, as the experience of a night terrors will be somewhat different in any individual.

I was going through some old notes on my pc recently and found a description I had written of my childhood night terrors. I thought it might be useful to share, if anyone out there has kids who are going through these at the moment and finding them terrifying and confusing.
Your child’s night terrors will of course be different to mine - different images, sounds, etc, but you can get some idea of what the child is feeling from these notes:

My Childhood Night Terrors

I used to wake up, covered in sweat from head to toe, and I would see sheep (yes, sheep!), and people and nameless creatures and things coming in the door, in through the window, out of the walls, pouring out of corners, covering the ceiling, crowding me, suffocating me. There was noise - a sort of buzz of words and odd sounds (and lots of ‘baaaing’), and colours all mixed up, and the whiteness of the sheep’s coats, turning dingy grey, and then greyness and blackness as all these ‘things’ cut out the light and tried to suffocate me.

I would scream and scream for my parents to save me. I was told that my eyes were almost popping out of my head and I used to gesture at the ’sheep’ and say “get them away, please get them away!” And I would cling tight to my bemused and worried parents and they would try to bring me out of it, and I would try and try to wake up…

But I was already awake… but the ‘things’ were still coming to get me. It was no good trying to wake myself up if I was awake already and that made the fear even worse. I would eventually calm down, and the images and sounds would slowly fade. But it seemed to take forever.

The night terrors slowly tailed off. I had my adenoids and tonsils removed and had less ‘childhood infections’, and that seemed to help. But occasionally in the daytime I would get a fleeting glimpse of the terror - the feeling of being overwhelmed and that my head was exploding with images and thoughts and sounds.

Sometimes in maths lessons, when we had a problem to solve which led to infinity, that feeling would return. Or if I looked at the sky at night, or thought about time and space for too long, that feeling of overwhelming pressure would sometimes appear again (and still does).

Luckily nowadays I can always ’shake off’ the feeling, by concentrating on something else.

For me, I think the feeling of being overwhelmed probably continued because of the type of person I am (I let myself get overwhelmed a lot ) And the sheep? Well, I guess someone told me to ‘count sheep’ when I couldn’t get to sleep one night. Seems the night terrors took the counting a little too far…

But anyway, that is how Childhood Night Terrors felt to me at the age of about 5 or 6.

Oh yes, and I don’t mind sheep at all now!

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If anyone is wondering why I have not posted here since 15th August, when I wrote about Cynicism and Depression, it is partly because I have been busy doing all my other work online, but mainly because the account providers where Fraying Edges is hosted decided to mess about with my hosting, grrr!!!

In fact, I did make another post after that one, on Night Terrors, but that disappeared never to be seen again… It was a long post too, and informative. More grrr’s!!!

I have several different hosting accounts, but the one I use for this particular blog appeared to be the best - fast, easy to work and with extremely good support. Nothing has changed here… apart from the fact that once you start getting a ton of visitors to your blog, the hosting account in question decides to take the blog (and all other blogs on the hosting account, plus email services and any other tools you have hosted there) ‘off air’ for several hours a day and at odd times.

Hence hosting stress!

For the last couple of weeks, I have been searching diligently for new website hosts. Ones who are reasonably priced, good on support, provide automatic install for wordpress, drupal and all the other stuff I use (installs and updates of tons of blogs and sites is not good news when you have to do it all manually)… and who will not throw up their hands in horror when you actually get a nice number of visitors en masse.

So far I have hit a brick wall. And I must say ‘buyer beware’ when you look at hosting packages.

Now, for most of my blogs, I am quite happy with Hostgator. And Servage is great too for having a European Hosting Account. Both provide tons of hosting space, use of numerous domain names, email accounts, instant install of Wordpress, etc, etc, and are great with average size blogs with an average number of visitors. Along with the other hosts I use (who I cannot recommend quite as highly…), they do the job efficiently and with great support. For someone starting to build a blog (or a number of blogs), then these guys are definitely the way to go.

But once you get a blog like Fraying Edges Depression Help, which gets loads of visitors to certain posts, en masse from Stumbleupon, etc (and you are all very welcome, by the way ), you need a host which provides more Resources. You can upgrade your account at your cheap shared hosting accounts (which I had in place already), but at the end of the day, shared hosting will still leave you offline, or receiving ‘warning emails’ (followed by your account being very closely monitored for every little ‘bump’), or simply losing your websites altogether, if you get a persistently large number of visitors.

So I have been searching for a hosting solution. But I have yet to find one…

Well, that’s not completely true…. I have found a couple of VPS (Virtual Private Server - or VDS [virtual dedicated server]) hosts I am using and monitoring for some of my new blogs and new tools I use to post to them. But I will not recommend them here until I know for sure they do all they say they are going to do (99.998% uptime, great customer support etc, etc,…). We will see…

Why not buy dedicated hosting? Because I am not very ‘tech aware’ and the thought of being ‘all alone’ on a dedicated server is scary , but I’m working on that one, slowly…

But at this point in time Fraying Edges is still on that original shared hosting account and spending its time on and off air as the host feels fit. Moving it to another host will take more stress and I am not ready to deal with that yet!

So, if you arrived here and found this blog offline (and then came back again to find it online, otherwise you would not be reading this, ), that’s the reason why.

And if anyone out there can give me a link to a reliable web host who allows for large hitting blogs, who provides great support, instant installs, etc, and who would be willing to help me move Fraying Edges to their server, then please let me know (either here, or by emailing me at zanianow (at) frayingedges (dot) com). I do not promise to use them (depends on relative price and what they allow me to install), but I will be happy to check them out.

End of stress-filled post!

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