This has been my first year writing on Hive, and you have no idea how much that helped me. I was always a writer in the sense that I expressed myself far better in letters than vocals. I wanted to get back into writing for a long time, but never quite found the motivation as I was lacking a platform – Facebook just doesn’t cut it. "Finding" Hive as a blog to express myself and my thoughts was one of the best things happening to me this year.
It feels like being able to express myself more freely. Here, nobody really knows me, despite a few people I got on board. I don’t have a role in a community, I’m not the baker or the father or the friend or the boss or the businessman or the citizen or the cook. I’m just beelzael – I’m not even my real name, and yet I might be more me, as beelzael has been my online alias for around 25 years now. It accompanied me through most of my life. Writing that down feels strange. Makes me think about “alias” and their meaning in general. But that’s not important right now.
While writing here, I’ve grown a lot more confident in my thoughts, my expressions, my way of perceiving the world, my values. I’ve opened up more, and even shared a few articles over at the other platforms, allowing that big crowd to find my blog – or at least those interested, which then reduced the amount of people that I exposed my inner thoughts to. I think I’m on the right path, and although I’m sure that there will be some mishaps and mistakes on the way – there always are, nobody is perfect (except for a certain Irish blogger, of course) –, I’m at a point now that I can accept those mistakes and use them as lesson to become more coherent with my values. Just like Marcus Aurelius reminds himself of.
That, too, has brought a lot to me. Hive sparked the interest into reading more thoughts, into broadening the spectrum of thoughts that I expose myself to, that are different from mine. Disagreeing is one thing, but being able to articulate why I disagree is in another league. Here, I do have to articulate it, and to do so I have to think about it first, find the reasons. Sure, I could generically blurt out some nonsense as many people do to get a quick upvote, but that wouldn’t be very coherent. That’s not an action that I want others to do on my posts, so I’m out.
And that, too. Hive made me think about community. About the many ways that one can exploit community, damage it, pursue egoistical goals without any concern for the general well-being. And the result of those thoughts was that I don’t want to be that way. I made a lot of progress about how I want community to be, and the role that I want to play in it, be it here, online, or in real life, where I talked so much about community that I think I’m close to the point that everyone roles their eyes now hearing it. Which is okay, I can still write it, I don’t see your eyes rolling.
So, to all of my readers that punish themselves and their eyes with my writing – thank you! Thank you for reading, thank you for commenting, thank you for writing, thank you for curating, thank you for being a surprisingly important part in my personal development. And I thought social media was dead and useless…
A special thanks goes to 
I wish you all a great 2026, with a lot of happiness and smiles against all odds!
Yours Sincerely,
Beelzael
P.S.: Okay yeah, here they are, because I love stats and made two different "wraps" as the younglings call it:
Oh my. I made $2000 in therapy for myself. That's Hive. Cheers to that!
Please feel free to engage in any original way, including dropping links to your posts on similar topics. I'm happy to read (and curate) any quality content that is not created by LLM/AI, as well as read your own experience and point of view, I love to learn!