Returning to gXp and Dealing with My Continuing Recovery

So, it looks like I haven’t updated geekXpop since July 4th of this year. Wow! That is a long time for a site to be dormant. But, given everything that I have been going through this year, and seeing how gXp is almost exclusively a one-man show, with the occasional help from my wife and a couple of really good friends, if I don’t have the time or energy to come out and dedicate myself to the site, that is what’s going to happen. But I’ll be honest, dealing with the mental issues I have is excruciatingly draining on an almost daily basis. In case you don’t know or don’t remember, I am dealing with a number of mental disabilities including high and social anxiety, major depressive disorder, bipolar 2 disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ve been dealing with these and lying to myself about them since I was a young boy, that nothing was wrong with me and I pretended that everything was okay and never told anyone about what I was going through. And for nearly 30 years I managed to hide and ignore what was bothering me on a daily basis. Add that some trauma that I suffered around the time that I was 8/9 years old, and it was a recipe for disaster that eventually caught up with me and led me to having a severe mental breakdown back in September 2017.

Since then I have been fighting to get my life back in order, meaning returning to work, being a conducive father, husband and family member, and maintaining this site. But, as you can see from the last update to this site, I haven’t exactly succeeded in doing a lot of that. I have been out of work since last September, I am a bit ashamed to say that my functions as a husband and father have been extremely lacking since that day, and I have left this site in neglect since then. And even though I have seen a group of therapists and psychiatrists, gone through a number of therapeutic patient groups, and a number of medication combos, they all seem to help just a little or sometimes not at all. And to say that this is a frustrating dilemma to be in is an extreme understatement. It seems that for every step forward I take, I take two backwards – and sometimes it has almost been too much for me to bare. Being completely honest with you all, I have contemplated suicide on at least a weekly basis and have even attempted suicide at least three times since then, twice by overdosing. It’s been one hell of a taxing journey, and from what I can tell, this is just the beginning of a long road. But, I need to start trying to get back to a normal sense of life and hope for the best where it comes to my recovery. That means getting back to work on December 3rd, getting over my social anxiety by attending events (large and small), and dedicating some time to getting back to running gXp.

For a time, I toyed with the idea of either giving up completely on the site or just restarting what I am doing here and rebrand what I had started. But I have spent too much time, energy, and money on this site to simply abandon it or start over. I didn’t start this site to simply toss it away when life got too hard. As I am fighting back against my mental disorders and fighting on to not give up, I want to continue fighting to keep gXp running and make sure that I get back to where I used to be with regards to content for the site. I just don’t want to give up on the site. And with some advice from some very prominent geek culture figures that I met at a panel at Los Angeles Comic Con (who I will talk about in my next post at gXp), I decided to continue on with gXp and renew my efforts here with the following (small as it may be) that I have already built with it. When I posed my question to them about continuing with gXp or starting over, after some very resounding words and some encouragement, they said that only I could answer what to do moving forward – and after sleeping on their advice over the weekend, I decided that I needed to continue my efforts here, and I thank them immensely for their advice. So that’s what I’m going to do here – continue with gXp and work to make it as good or better than it was before.

Now, with me starting off with the site again, and because I am still dealing with my mental disabilities, I am going to change the timetable about posting on the site. Instead of trying to post new content or editorials on a daily basis, I am thinking about rotating the schedule from week to week. That means that while on one week I will post on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and the next week posting on Tuesday and Thursday before returning to the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday schedule, and so on. This is mainly to reduce the stress on myself until I feel that I am well enough to post new and unique content on a daily basis once again. However, I will try to post press releases that I feel are relevant to the gXp readership on a somewhat daily basis, depending on when I receive them and what their content is about. Also, I will try and work on some relationships with past contributors to work on new content exclusive to gXp to help alleviate some of the work stress on me. And, because they have been asking intently as of late, I believe that I will start letting my three kids start creating content for the site, whether it be new post or videos that they are eager to work on.

So, yeah – that is the gist of this post. Kind of letting you know, whoever may be reading this, that I am back… hopefully for the long haul once again while I am working on getting through all this. The good things is when I presented this idea on continuing my writing here to my therapists, they agreed that me getting back into writing would be a good idea and should be beneficial to my recovery. So, triple yay, right? I get to continue with a brand that I love and created, I get to come back to writing, and it should help with my therapy. What more could I ask for? Anyway, I hope that those of you who return to reading what I have to say on here continue to stay with me; and those of you who may have stumbled upon this site for the first time – welcome, and I hope that you enjoy the content here at gXp.