Identity and Mental Health
For many years I defined myself as a writer... a failed writer. I completed a degree in imaginative writing, after which I spent the best part of five years working a series of bar jobs. Getting fckd up every weekend, and basically trying to relive my student years.
Escapism was my religion. I embraced chaos, stacked caps and burnt the paths of exhileration across already depleted synapses. Dodged the real-world nine to five while striving for oblivion. This is what happens when your identity appears to be an illusion with which you're constantly at odds.
But something changed last year. The picture above shows me finishing the first draft of an article I've been commissioned to write for an online magazine. I chose to write it under an assumed name for a variety of reasons, and I can't share the article on here because of copyright considerations. I am going to keep pushing the magazine to set up an account here but that is not particularly important right now.
What is important for me is that how we define ourselves informs our psychology. I was like a ship without a rudder, at the mercy of the whims of the wind. All of this fed my depression, leaving me hollow and raw in the face of that gale. The fact I'd completed my degree accruing over sixteen thousand pounds of debt and was still earning nothing from writing, ground me down.
Depression can be a strange bed fellow, clinical depression even more so. I recently watched a vlog, Mental Health Awareness from someone I met at Steemfest 3 called @artakush. It reminded me that most people don't understand what is going on in the mind of a depressive... and often assume that it is something that they'll just 'get over'. This is the biggest misconception I see around mental health. I know from long experience that there is no 'getting over it', just degrees of coping. It is true that strategies can help, and medication for some, although they make me a thousand times worse, but for the most part it never goes away. It just varies in intensity.
However, when you live in balance, and can find meaning in your life's endeavour, in my case writing, it really helps to ground you. Helps highlight the joy in the small things and forge through the sticato rhythms of manic depression. This is why I am happier than I was five years ago. The fact I get paid for my freelance writing affirms my choices, lends legitimacy to how I identify myself, and helps turn down the volume on the inner critic.
Steem Perceptions and the Doppler Effect
There is a lot of inconsistencies for a writer on steem. I have enjoyed writing on steem, god knows my behaviour here shows how much I believe in the platform. From curating for @curie, to powering up everything I've earned, posting short stories that I should have submitted to literary journals; all of this shows my level of commitment. But there comes a point when mounting debt, lack of decent support on posts and the sheer time it takes to network on steem will drive the most dedicated writer down.
This may not be a popular opinion, but I'm going to say it anyway as I've had enough of the bullshit 'fear of flagging' that permiates steem; this place does not reward based on quality but rather on ability to network. I could mention many people who are recieving huge reward, comparatively, for content that says (or adds) very little in terms of meaning or artistry. These people are being rewarded based on either thier ability to network, build projects/communities or the size of their steem wallet.
So what is this rant all about? To put it simply, networking is very difficult when you're a depressive. It is not fun, it is not easy and above all it drains your energy, something of which I have a very limited supply. A lot of people on steem are very project focused, and this causes them to forget that not everyone can be this way. Not everyone has the energy or the time, or the mental capacity. Some of these people will show you thier support when you put a tone of time in helping to grow their project (which I have done in the past), but will soon forget you when you can no longer help. This is the Steem Doppler Effect I mentioned, as you become unable or unwilling to contribute, the frequency of their interest (and support) fades away. What doesn't fade away is your ability and the quality of your content, and this makes for a very unsatisfying dynamic. This is what turns a lot of people off steem when they first join and even drives long term users away. It is part of why many people from the outside looking in see steem as a Ponzi scheme and why we are not fulfilling our stated aim of rewarding quality content for its own sake.
I am not leaving steem, or going away, what I am expressing is simply the culmination of sixteen months of frustration. It is long past time that I focus on earning the money that I need through freelance writing gigs to pay the rent and start paying off debts.
I am really grateful for the boost that steem as a platform gave me to help dispel over five years of writers' block. It inspired me to find a high level of creativity which had lain dormant for a long time. I will still put the odd poem or story up here, but I'm looking to post more video content in the future and less creative writing, which is seriously undervalued.
Just to qualify some of my frustrations I have linked two works of fiction below that are lengthy and very undervalued for what they represent. Potentially these stories could have made between $100-$250 if accepted to a magazine. I have written many stories like these on steem. Before anyone gets on their highhorse about me being negative toward steem, I'd ask you to read them and consider the points I've raised above before leaping to judgement.
Does Steem as a platform reward based on quality? This is the main point of why I, and many others, feel such frustration. It is also why user retention of quality content creators is so bad.
Thnx for reading 🙂
All photos in this post are my own property.