Would you read my story to discover how we began this journey together on Steem? Will you share your story with us here in the comments to help us get to know you?
If you read fast like me, I will summarize in this first paragraph starting with the picture of the invitation I got to Steem.
Here are the links you might find useful to match with my other social media accounts referenced above.
https://www.facebook.com/jbanfield/
https://www.youtube.com/jerrybanfield
https://twitter.com/JerryBanfield
http://jerrybanfield.com/
http://u.jerrybanfield.com/
Will you try reading more because now I am about to share the really interesting stuff?
My name is Jerry Banfield and I am an alcoholic. Every day I say that at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and I share that here with you because it is up to me to carry the message and AA is a huge part of my life. If you would like to hear the speaker meeting of my life including the worst of my sex problems, alcoholism, gambling/money addiction, compulsive video game playing adding up to about 20,000 hours, overeating so much I was 50+ pounds overweight most of my life, suicidal depression with panic attacks, and finally my journey into recovery, would you read the summary here below or take the complete video course for free on my website at https://jerrybanfield.com/freecourses/ which is named "Speaker Meeting 2017"?
We are here together today because something in this universe decided to help me. Maybe it was my mother in law who encouraged my wife to keep loving me even when I could not love myself. Maybe it was my desperate outreach to God for help. Maybe it was the prayers of my parents. Maybe it was the thousands of men and women who listed to me share at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and loved me until I could love myself. Maybe it was because Brene Brown had the courage to create The Power of Vulnerability which I was able to listen to in bed with hangovers. What I am sure of is that for at least 10 years prior to age 29 I was doing everything I could to rebel and leave this planet before something intervened and showed me a way out into love and service each day. Today I am extremely grateful to have a chance to have a wonderful life and to share that with you.
Thankfully I have remembered the reason I came to earth to begin with which was to learn how to love and be of service to you today. Now I have a life worth living and as I write this my goal is to write what is most helpful to you. Obviously I would rather keep all of my limitations a secret and act like I am the great whoever today that will lead you to salvation. The truth is I am lucky to get through most days without having a breakdown into crying. Yesterday changing a diaper left me in tears for an hour because my daughter wanted to play while I wanted to get a fresh diaper on her. I was afraid of yelling at her and afraid of treating her how I was treated at her age which for my parents was a huge improvement over how they were raised. Here we are together for Easter in 2017.
At the same time, I spend about 95% of my time awake in amazing happiness. In Publix the other day a young man that might or might not have had Down Syndrome was bagging my groceries. Since about 13 years old this was a cue for me to feel sorry for him and think things like "that's really too bad" or "he doesn't even know what he's missing" as I would judge that clearly my intellect and ability to be UNHAPPY made me superior. Instead, I looked at him and thought "WOW he is as HAPPY AS I AM" and I felt incredibly blessed.
If you are not up for watching a 12 hour video course right this moment, I will continue to share the basics here and start from further back! I am grateful I have an amazing family today living in Saint Petersburg, Florida (Tampa metro area in the south east USA) including a wife, nearly two year old daughter, and two rescue labs.
It is easy to be grateful because I nearly drank myself to death and almost took my own life a lot of times. When I went to the University of South Carolina at age 18, I had done nothing more illegal than speed in traffic and nothing more hurtful than scream "I wish I had never been born" at my parents a few times when they would not let me play as many video games as I wanted. From 18 to 22 I became a total delinquent committing over half of the "undetected crimes" listed on the law enforcement officer application I would later fill out at 23 years old. From age 22 to 30 I was anywhere from fat to morbidly obese but I would rationalize it at the gym by thinking "I am muscular" and "these Body Mass Indicator or BMI charts are full of shit." Torturing my body to death while trying to impress everyone else was my way of life. Here is a good example from my wedding day where I nearly ruined the wedding from getting drunk.
The craziest years of my life were 2008 and 2009 as a state law enforcement officer in South Carolina where I would be doing the same things like drunk driving off duty that I was arresting people for at work. Naturally I did not start doing this on my own but with the help of my coworkers who introduced me to drinking all night at bars and strip clubs just after getting out of field training. I never once remember anyone mentioning a designated driver. The hypocrisy of my life got to me a lot where often at 3 am my service weapon would wind up pointed at my head after I got too drunk to have a positive kill death ratio at Call of Duty: World at War. Thankfully a fling with a coworker which I then told everyone about led to so much drama they asked me to leave which I was happy to do despite having planned to murder them all a hundred times if they ever did it. I called my parents and moved home and thought everything was fixed. When I was graduating from the policy academy as shown below, this was pretty far from the ending I imagined!
My family loved me so much that for a while life was a lot better and I met my wife in 2011. She is an absolute angel and saved me from a certain miserable end. I pulled a great bait and switch with her by looking the best I had in years when we started dating and then proceeding to get as fat as ever within a few years. See this picture with my wife at 30 years old for reference.
Somehow my wife loved me through what I thought was mostly normal behavior of drinking all day while she was at work and all night when she tried to sleep as well as being crazy stressed out and working on my business online nearly every waking moment I was sober. My dad dying finally put me over the edge and I realized even though I had so many people that loved me in my life that I was getting close to taking my own life over feeling like such a disgusting person. I also realized I could not do anything about it because I had already tried so many times and failed that I was certain it was hopeless. This led to a desperate prayer to God for help. I said "Please God I will do ANYTHING to stop drinking." After that I thought "Maybe going to one of those AA meetings would be part of 'anything'." While this was a frequent prayer habit, the people at AA helped me to remember this prayer I made as I wanted to drink so bad I felt like I would suffocate to death over the next three months.
Then, some kind of miracle happened. I started taking the suggestions they gave me such as reading the book, praying when agitating, slowing down, getting a massage to relieve stress, and calling a sponsor or another alcoholic to help everyday. My wife then pointed out that what I was learning in AA probably applied to her family as well. In July 2014, the idea of who I was died and left in its place room for someone new to be born. If I had to guess, you are probably here for the someone new rather than the crazy alcoholic that I have been most of my life.
While I did not even notice right away, as soon as I did I embraced the full experience of my life. I started sharing my spiritual awakening with everyone and became willing to look at all the worst parts of my life. At the same time, my business was nearly bankrupt and it feels like divine intervention struck to save it. My wife and I were at about $500,000 in debt in 2014 with me having ran up about $70,000 of credit card debt to avoid going out of business and taking about $50,000 more in loans combined with owning a house and massive student loan debt. Objectively it looked hopeless.
In December 2014, I took a leap of faith in teaching full time online which appeared to offer little short term income but might provide massive potential. In just a few months, I was making $20,000+ a month selling my courses online with Udemy. An amazing ego trip followed for the next year with June 2016 showing over $600,000 in income from Udemy since December 2014 from 170,000+ students taking my courses online. I used the money to pay my friends $100,000+ to help and to pay off all my credit cards plus personal loans and to give my wife some to save as well as pay most all of our bills and buy us a new Toyota RAV4 Limited Hybrid to drive our daughter around in.
On June 10, 2016 Udemy sent me an email banning me from their website for policy violations which appeared to just be an excuse to get rid of me which was reasonable given that even though I was not technically violating any policy at all, I was dominating their website with every single loophole I could find.
For the next year, I struggled to find what to do next. I narrated audio books, tried teaching on other websites, played video games full time for a few months, and started trading cryptocurrencies. Meanwhile, my friend 
The dash masternode investment led me into budget proposals which got me into promoting Dash all over on my YouTube channel and Facebook page reaching about a million people within three months mostly with Facebook ads on my complete Dash masternode investing video. The price of Dash meanwhile was one of the first to rocket up going from $10 when I started buying to over $140 yesterday.
As I tried to get more involved in the Dash community after making more than 10 new videos which received overwhelming positive feedback except for one which I refilmed within a week, I was shocked to see the feedback I was getting. Even though there were no competing proposals and the budget money was literally being burned, many masternode owners found reasons to lay down harsh criticism and vote no on my proposals. The last proposal asked for the exact same amount as another proposal while offering to use half of the budget for advertising and the other half to make videos full time. Reading the comments and seeing the no votes roll in as masternode owners literally voted to burn up the money instead of give it to me was so infuriating that I ended up seeing that I did not belong as a member of the Dash community.
Two weeks ago I sold my Dash masternode very gratefully at $87,000 which after fees, taxes, and the initial investment left me with about $50,000 in profit most of which I put in the bank. The question then became what next? As the current cryptocurrency bubble began to explode, I looked for a good place to invest and started asking questions like "Where can I add the most value?" and "Which community would be most grateful to have me as a member?" and "Which cryptocurrency market is still the most undervalued?"
Initially I bought PIVX and the more I researched, the more I could see that I would have all the same problems I had with Dash using the budget proposals. Then I remembered
Within 24 hours, I powered all my Steem up and started filming a video class on The University of Jerry Banfield at http://u.jerrybanfield.com/courses/allincrypto which featured the benefits and risks as I saw them of investing in Steem. Yesterday I just cashed out everything else I had on Poloniex and Bitfinex into Steem for another 1+ Bitcoin investment. I am both happy to see the price is up today to $1.24 and sad that I had the common sense to not fool around trying to buy several more thousand in Steem last night right before bed. I think Steem is going to hit $10+ within the next three years and maybe be $100+ someday.
I am going to buy all the Steem I can on each month and continue investing here because I see that this is the community I have been looking for. Today I am hoping to buy at least $1000 more in Steem before the price goes up higher. While I realize everything has its benefits and limitations, the benefits are just right for me on Steem and so are the limitations. Before I have even made a post here, the feedback has been amazingly kind and I am extremely grateful for that. We have a chance here to make a top 10 website in the world and I am honored to have this chance to begin that journey with you here today!
If you enjoyed this post, will you please upvote it to help us collaborate and build our community here together?
Thank you very much for reading this and I hope you have a wonderful day today! I will be thinking of you throughout the day and do my best to read and respond to each comment!
Love,
Jerry