Snoskred - Life in the Country

There was a day in May, 2005 when I simply could not get out of bed.

I thought everything was fine in my life. I had a great job, one of the highest paying jobs I’d ever had. I got that job after I was treated very badly at a previous job. That’s a story in itself. The bottom line was, without knowing it I was very depressed and also without knowing it, I was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. That’s what my psychologist diagnosed, several months later when I finally managed to get some help for myself.

The day after the day I could not get out of bed, I found I could not get out of bed again. This went on for three weeks, until I finally had to admit I couldn’t go to work anymore. I resigned, and the dark hole I know as depression sucked me back in for the second time in my life. It is painful to think about that time, and it is painful to think about how I dealt with it.

I needed something to make me feel good about myself. I looked for reassurance in the wrong places. It was a huge mistake. It went on for several months like a roller coaster, until finally I hit rock bottom. I made up my mind. I was going to complete the one task I had to do, and then I was going to return home and take my own life. Whoa, that is hard to admit to you guys.

Please note, I am fine right now. Though I am well aware that I could find myself back there again in the future I am better equipped to deal with it now, and I would seek help rather than keep it to myself in the future.

How it is that I am sitting here now? A very good online friend of mine from Ireland who knew what I was going through and what I intended to do had the guts to call my family and ask them to get me some help. My family was shocked and I don’t think they believed how bad it was, because on the surface I seemed to be functioning fine. I was just keeping up appearances - and there might be someone around you right now who is doing exactly that.

After that happened, I got help. I started seeing a psychologist often at first, then dropping back to once a week. Another good friend of mine saw that I was in trouble, and thought that asking me to help with a project might be a good way to drag myself out of the hole I was in. He asked me to help out with an internet website, and I threw myself into it, heart and soul.

Honestly, that person literally saved my life at the time - though they did not know it - by giving me something outside of myself that I could concentrate on. I firmly believe that, and though they won’t like me saying it, I credit them with saving my life.

Looking back on it now, this was not a wise idea for me. I needed to take care of myself before I took care of anyone else or anything else. It was easy to bury my own problems and issues in order to worry about the problems and issues of a new website. I wasn’t well. I should have said no but it was something I believed in and something I wanted to be involved in. So I said yes, and got to work.

My life started to improve and one thing that helped greatly was The Other Half and I making the decision to move interstate. We had been stuck in a rut for a long time and we needed to shake things up. We began to look forward to that. The new website had been launched and was a big success but I needed to take some time for me and moving, and so I tried to get other people to fill the hole I would leave while I did that. Unfortunately people felt I was being pushy - well of course I was, there was a lot of work to be done and I knew I could not do it, so I had to ask other people to make a commitment to doing it.

It is infinitely easier to do something yourself rather than ask other people to do something. If I could have done it all myself I would have. Simply because to ask someone - can you do this by this date - and then watch them NOT do it, and then have to ask them if they are going to do it and if so, when will they have it done by is one of the most difficult things to do. I sucked at it.

I won’t lie to ya’all. There were a couple of times I honestly went way over the top in how I reacted to people not doing things they had promised to do. It would be easy to say - it wasn’t me, I was sick - but that isn’t the truth. I have to own my part in this. I have to take responsibility for what happened. I was at fault.

It *was* me - me under a lot of stress and pressure, me in the middle of a move interstate which I had never done before, and me not in the most mentally healthy place. Me also - who in early December right in the middle of all this stress and pressure - got kicked off a website I was a huge part of. Me who was trying to deal with that on top of everything else. I did not have the tools to deal with things in an appropriate way.

So I was told by my life-saving friend - go and move, we’ll deal with everything, when you come back everything will be fine - and I trusted and believed them, and did as I was told. However when I did return, nothing was fine. I soon found myself kicked off that site as well, none of the people I thought were my friends would talk to me, including my life-saving friend.

In fact many people had changed their contact information so I couldn’t even get in touch to ask - what happened? I couldn’t see what happened. Once I’d moved didn’t have a new psychologist I could see right away, I had to wait, so I couldn’t talk about what happened to someone who knew the situation like my old psychologist did. It was too fresh, too open a wound for me to see it with any clarity at all. I could only see that I was bleeding and in pain. It was only later that I was able to see my faults.

I was hurt, upset, angry, confused, so many things. It set me back quite a bit as far as getting better was concerned. I said some things out of hurt and anger which only made the situation worse. Then one friend said to me - forget all that stuff. Focus on scam-baiting. You’re good at it. I took that advice and ran with it. I got involved in a few baiting projects and this time I wasn’t so pushy. I didn’t ask anyone to do anything, if I couldn’t do it myself it did not get done.

Time passed. A lot of time. I got over it, got better, got plenty of therapy, got healthy again. I thought other people had built the bridge and walked over it but they had not, and they kept proving it to me by writing some very hurtful things to me that had nothing to do with what was being discussed. When they wrote their words were designed to wound, to hurt. However it didn’t wound or hurt me because in the wounded place I had a healthy scar.

It seemed to me that a lot of people were stuck back in January 2006 and instead of becoming less angry with me as time went by, they became more angry with me. It also seemed that some people were taking delight in playing people off against each other. They would tell me something that someone else said, which I would later find out that person didn’t say - and vice versa. Only nobody ever came to me and asked me - did you say this? They just assumed it was the truth.

I became the person who caused all the problems. Anytime something went wrong, the blame was put on me though most of the time I wasn’t involved in any way! At first I tried to fight it, defend myself, but after a while I realised there was nothing I could do about it. I just let it go over my head and I kept baiting.

Other friends of mine were upset by it, and many of them walked away from the websites where it happened as a result. They kept telling me - leave, you don’t need that kind of stuff in your life. But I hung in there, hoping that by showing these people I was not angry at them, that I didn’t hold a grudge, that I had built the bridge.. maybe one day they would forgive me for my past mistakes and accept me as a useful member of the community. After all, I never killed anyone, right? Everyone makes mistakes, right? Surely people would get over it in time.

Early this week something happened that I did not agree with, and I said so. The amount of anger that came to me as a result of expressing my opinion totally shocked me. It should not have shocked me because it had happened so many times before, but each time I was naive enough to think “It will be different this time - more time has passed, surely they have got over it by now, surely they can see that it is not them personally I have a problem with but their actions”.

It was then that I decided the only way these people I once loved so dearly (yes, loved, though I never told them so) were ever going to get over this was by me removing myself from the equation. So earlier this week I said goodbye to a website I believed in and loved as much as I would have loved a site I owned myself - a site I had promoted, driven traffic to, and a site where I wanted very much to be an active part of the community. I will not deny I shed tears over it. I asked them to close my account, and they did so.

It was not an easy decision to make, but I had to do it because I couldn’t stand to see the people I once respected so angry at me. Still, after all this time. And if any of the people from that site are reading this now, I just want to say - I’m sorry. I hope my leaving means you can heal that anger and hurt that clearly I caused you to feel. I hope one day you can see that I cared about you and I miss you, my once-good friends. I wish you all the best but most of all I wish you peace. I wish that you will take that anger and throw it away, rather than transferring it to the next person who makes a mistake.

I remember the good times, not the bad. It was a good thing for a while there. I have forgotten every unpleasant thing ever said to me, and I forgave the people saying those unpleasant things a long time ago.. As it says in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice - “But in such cases as these, a good memory is unpardonable. This is the last time I shall ever remember it myself.” - And this is the last time I will mention it here on the blog. The book is closed, and I won’t open it again.

I’m not the same person I was two years ago. In fact it is almost the exact anniversary of when I made my decision to take my own life. I am so glad now that I did not, and that is one reason I have written this, as difficult as it was - because if there is anyone out there having those thoughts I want you to know that help is out there, you only have to ask for it. And it does get better. Honestly, it does. You just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

It is time for me to move forward. I’ve put the depression firmly behind me now and I know the warning signs to look out for so I don’t go back there again. It is time to look to the future, and I do that with open arms and an open heart.

It is time to focus on the good things I have in my life, and there are so many of them - including all of you who read this blog. I thank you for being here, it means a lot to me.

It is also time to begin the work to move this blog to Wordpress. I have put aside next week for learning to use it, basically a week of Wordpress training. Hopefully within two weeks I will have made the switch, but I’ll let you all know more about that as the time gets nearer.

This week at art class my teacher told us about one of the not so fun aspects of country life - being talked about and it getting back to you. She and her partner are renovating a house, and mainly due to a lack of funds but also due to a desire to be environmentally friendly and use materials like straw bales and paints which are not damaging to the environment with unusual paint colors, some of the aspects of their renovation are being discussed at various dinner parties.

She knows many people in the town, and somehow at these dinner parties there is always a friend of hers who lets her know what is being said. There’s probably equal amounts of positive and negative, and many of the developments and other renovations in the town end up being discussed as well. But she admitted it is a little unsettling to know that people are talking about you.

Another major difference I’ve found when living in the country is the stuff you carry in your car. In the city I rarely had anything in the boot or backseat. In the country most people and now even me tend to have a lot of items which need to be carried. In my car boot for example, I have a bunch of green shopping bags, and a cooler bag which you can put cold items in for drives - on hot days I use these to carry home cold things from the supermarket, even though it’s a short-ish drive. We have a little cooler bag which we put cold cans in anytime we’re going on a daytrip type of drive.

In one of the green bags I have my little kit of assorted things you may need -

- latex gloves. Useful for many reasons but my major one is to check the pouches of roos, wombats and other pouch animals - babies can survive up to three days after the parent is killed and they can be rescued. If you’re in Australia and you see an animal by the side of the road with a green stripe spraypainted on it, this means someone has already checked the pouch. Also useful in case of first aid situations.

- wet wipes of various kinds - anti-bacterial, glass cleaning, ones to clean hands, yes I am a germophobe but also these are handy when fishing!

- First aid kit. One night back in the city when we lived on a main road, we were just sitting down to a lovely chicken roast when we heard this huge bang. A couple of elderly people were driving along the road and they ran right up the back end of a car parked on the side of the road. Having done first aid for many years as a St John’s cadet, I grabbed the little kit we had there and ran out to help while the other half called the police. This poor old couple, I felt terrible for them - and it was a dark red car under a tree which meant you really couldn’t see it very well. It turned out ok, they were fine, and we even went to the hospital to stay with them until their family got there and then visited them at home once they got out because they were so lovely. Imagine being the first one to an accident scene in the country, where help can be quite a drive away and mobile phones don’t always work. You bet I carry a good first aid kit.

- a rug. Useful for injured animals, like the time I sat an emu on my lap for 30kms till we got it to a vet. It had been hit by a car on the hay plains and was grazed and stunned. We weren’t sure it could walk, so we wrapped it in the rug and it became my new best friend. Emus are not small birds, you know. They can also be extremely aggressive. But it was worth it because the bird was very calm and seemed to know we were helping, and ended up being fine.

Another big difference is you have no hesitation buying things in bulk. We go to a local feed store here and buy two 20kg bags of kitty litter every couple of months. This costs us $30 in total. It works out to .75 cents per kilo of kitty litter, it’s one trip where you have to lug something heavy, it lasts us ages, we put it into these big buckets and use it as we need it.. We never run out because we always go back when the second bag gets opened. It’s a great deal. So if we go somewhere and we see a great deal for buying in bulk we usually just grab it.

And the feed store, I love it there. It’s like a trip back in time. They have a lot of really great stuff you’ve never heard of before. They sell feed for every animal imaginable. THEY HAVE LIVE CHICKENS. I really want to have chickens of my own one day.

We now have a rule for shopping in the country. If you see something and you want it, grab it because it is not likely to be there the next time you’re looking for it.

The kitty post will have to wait because I want to try and get some photos to go with it. Keep an eye on the blog over the weekend to see photos of our trip posted by Sephy. Be good ya’all and have a great weekend, I plan to.

It’s 1:30am and my mind is wide awake. The other half went to bed quite a while ago now, and I don’t want to go in and read till I’m tired because it will wake him up. Much of this post won’t make a lot of sense. It’s ok, I just need to get it out.

I’ve made many mistakes in my life, but the one that keeps annoying me today is why did I place my faith in other people when I should probably have struck out on my own and created what I wanted to create, especially when those other people suddenly decided they didn’t want me to be involved in things to the same extent I originally was.

Those people let me down and yet, I continue to support them. Those people say nasty things about me when they think nobody else is looking. Well, people are looking and whether you like it or not, they have no good reasons to treat me badly, so they let me know what is said. And I don’t say anything, and I probably should, but I figure for the good of everyone, it’s better just to let them talk and try to show them by my actions that I am not the person they think I am.

I know this - I have done a lot of good things. I don’t talk trash behind peoples backs - if I am going to say something about you I say it to you. Maybe I should have done what everyone was urging me to do - create my own empire, make my own site, do my own thing, but that would have taken the focus away from what is really important, and it would have meant a lot of the work I have put into things would have to have been put into creating the empire, and realistically that would have been a waste of my time and energy.

People think I’m holding grudges, but I don’t. I’ve put the past behind me, well behind me - they are the ones with the chips on their shoulder and no real desire to remove them. I was told to build a bridge, and I did. And let’s face it, someone who said some very nasty things about me, and continues to do so from what I am told, recently I put a fair bit of effort in to doing something nice for them - for the good of the bigger picture.

People ask me why, when I was treated so badly by certain people, I continue to stick around. It’s a good question and one I find myself asking myself today. I have a little piece of paper on my desk. You might have seen it in the doll pictures. Maybe you can’t make out what it says, but it is the answer, and that is why it sits there on my desk, right in front of me, day after day.It’s entirely true. What it says is - sometimes taking the high road is no fun at all.

It hasn’t been fun. I’ll be honest with you. I don’t enjoy the way certain people treat me. But the good things that have come from me taking that high road are very worthwhile and one day, maybe, those people who have been so unpleasant will come around and see my actual actions instead of making sh*t up. They’ll look and see and maybe they will eventually think - damn, she did that, even while we were talking crap about her? Even when we kicked her in the teeth, and then kept kicking her in the teeth, over and over till most of her teeth were missing? What would I have done in her shoes? Would I have stuck around? Would I have stuck it out? No f*cking way. I’d have resigned publicly, made a huge fuss, gone off and made my own site, and split the community even further from what it already was.

Right now today, I am truly wondering if this has been worth it, when people won’t let go of the past, and they still seem to think kicking me in the teeth is a great idea. And maybe what I should do is exactly what *they* would have done in my place - resign publicly, cause a huge fuss, go off and make my own site, and split the community. But I can’t do that, not because I can’t go make my own site, I have in house technical support and my own server is finally back online etc, but because I believe the community is split enough already, and further fractures will only do more harm.

It’s time. People need to stop trying to hurt each other, and remember why they are involved in any of this at all.

Today I did go make my own site. It’s actually for all my stuff, because now my server is back online I’ve managed to get things into one place, and some kind of order. It’s got all my scambaiting audios there in one place, well a lot of them anyway. I’m going to get back into doing more of that stuff soon.

Everyone gets depressed from time to time, I think. I have struggled with it myself. I’ll be honest, it looked to me when I was at the bottom of that hole that I would never be able to climb my way out of it, but I did, mostly by my fingernails.

I have a really good friend who is struggling with depression at the moment. And yes, for any of you fucknut moderator and admins from scambaiting sites out there, he is *only* a friend. There is no dodgy internet relationship going on. Not that it is ANY of your business, but you know, how about you shove it up your ass, mmkay? It being the nearest large object. Preferably about the size of an automobile. Without lube. Yes, that’s a mental image I can live with thanks.

You should be ashamed of yourselves for how you treated this very good friend of mine. Someone who has always been there - not just for me, but for *anyone* who needed help and asked for it. Someone who now does not do a lot of the stuff he could do simply because you have shown him time and time and TIME again that you do not appreciate it. That you just treat him like my “lapdog”.

Sephy, I know this is not going to be easy but I am here for you and you will come out the other side of this. I am so proud of you for standing up and admitting when something is wrong, and now moving forward to working on a solution. It might not happen overnight, but it will happen.

Guys, you don’t know this, but Sephy is the person I turn to when I need help. It might be something as simple as searching for something on the internet (which I am terrible at but thanks to his help am improving) or something as complicated as helping me organise a spreadsheet to keep track of which lad I am baiting with which address from which country. He is also an incredibly talented baiter, and is currently baiting a couple of lads as my character tyr@ and I am just doing the voices on the phone calls.

When you and I work together Sephy, lads suffer. That’s what it is all about, working together. The fucknuts seem to have forgotten that. They would not know how to work together if they found themselves all tied together in a bag at the bottom of a swimming pool, and they would all drown. You and I wouldn’t mate. We’d work to find a way out, together. Just like we will find a way to dig you out of this depression. Thank you so much for always being there to help me. You don’t know how much I appreciate it. And I believe you really are an Aussie on the inside - being there for your mates is something this country is based on.