For about a year, I was essentially s full time steemian. I read sometimes upward of fifty posts a day, commenting on almost all of them. I sometimes wrote 3-4 posts a day. I spent hours in the chats.
It was a combination of many factors that led me to eat drink and breathe Steem, some were positive and others negative. If I were to tell anyone just how much time I spent here, they’d probably think I was wasting my life. But I don’t feel that way.
$2000 during the course of a year doesn’t sound like much when you live in a major metropolis, especially considering how much time was spent. But it’s crypto, something I had been hopelessly watching for six years without a means of obtaining any and now I have some. More than that, I found my very first readers and built a community of likeminded people. Some of these people are turning into lifelong friends. We have similar goals and were are working towards them together.
Perhaps the most valuable thing I gained from steemit is the introspection. The ecosystem really tests you when you are so engaged in it. For a serial idealist like myself, it’s so easy to get disappointed. It’s also easy to see limitless potential. You want to do everything you can to help the place maintain an air of dignity but you feel discouraged when it seems everyone is pushing in the other direction. This happened so often. At the same time, I ALWAYS felt some level of support, sometimes only from minnows, but sometimes from powerful steemians as well. And then at times support from a few powerful people wasn’t even enough to really change the direction things were going.
Life will reflect to you what is inside of you, and steemit is a fabulous reflection. There is so much of everything so that if you focus on the negative, you will find every reason to feel worse, and if you focus on the positive you can always find glimmers If hope and inspiration.
A few months ago I decided that I needed to focus more on my 3D life. I found myself waiting for crypto to explode so things could be easier and didn’t want to wait any longer. It’s not that I don’t have faith that Steem will be back to $5 or even that I can’t wait until then, I just don’t want to live life waiting. I want to do everything I can in every moment.
Aside from the positive reasons, part of my motivation for spending so many hours on steemit was that I didn’t have much going for me in my physical life. I was living in a place that had been destroyed by tourism with little potential for change or excitement. I had such a small stream of income that I could barely afford a weekend trip. On top of it all I had to spent 20-30% of my income (and time) on physical therapy and healing back problems that had become ever more complicated by malpractice. And deep in my heart I still felt like a victim. So in many ways steemit was an escape.
So when I realized I didn’t want to escape anymore, I found myself engaging less. Right around the same time Something unexpected happened and I was forced to leave this place that I once loved and now hated. Going somewhere new was exciting but after finally finding a good massage therapist and with little money to survive until I found a job, steemit moved to the bottom of my list of priorities.
No one knows what is a curse and what is a blessing..
There is a chinese idiom 塞翁失马 (sai weng shi ma) which essentially means this. A mans son finds a new horse and thinks it is a blessing. He falls and breaks his leg. He thinks it’s a curse, but due to the broken leg, he does not have to go to fight a war. Something like this. This is my favorite chinese idiom and now I am living it.
Truth be told, it’s been an extremely stressful summer. Most people would have used that unused credit card tucked away in their wallet to buy a plane ticket home to mom and dads house and cast their dreams aside, looking for the best paying job they could find and living life quietly from then on. I am not most people though. I’m using this upheaval as an opportunity to go back to Japan, which was the plan all along, one I had kept putting off because I did not want to work full time. I WILL start working full time again, not because I’ve given up, but because I want to give myself time to grow as an artist while my art slowly becomes sustainable.
My partner is going through a similar struggle-turned-transformation, where she is being forced to make her own decisions and, this time, standing up to the plate. It’s funny, it seems almost everyone I know is in a similar situation, making the most delicious lemonade out of lemons being thrown at their heads.
Being the Sun
When I imagine the person I truly desire to be, I can describe it as “an infinite source of excitement and inspiration”. That person has time and energy to focus on art, work a full time job (for a little while) and to stay active and engaged on steemit. Now that I have my tribe around me and I feel the tides are turning, that life is going to look a lot more like the way I desire it to be, i realize that I am ready to be that person. I’m done being a victim, I’m done getting sucked in to depressing facts and polarized debates and sulky bouts of depression.
I love life, and I have energy to do all the things I want to do, so long gone as my body allows it, and if it doesn’t, I’ll gladly give it the attention it needs. My body will heal too, as soon as it’s ready.
So I’ve decided to get involved in steemit again, to build our Be Awesome community further, to make a stronger connection to 
I’m going to try to engage mor and NOT use this engagement as an escape or allow it to monopolize my time. I’ll continue to put time and effort into my work off steemit, into my job, into the people in my daily life, and still make time for steemit. I’ve got plans for a series of language hacks. Deadposts is still running. I will also get back to more heartfelt posting and reading other stories posts.
I’m mostly excited about the people. I don’t anticipate my payout will change much and I’m quite happy with the support I’m receiving from
The Be Awesome community
One thing I really want to do is bring in a few new faces (or bring back some old ones) to the Be Awesome discord. If you enjoy my posts, you will love our community. We started a year ago with the intention of making friends without the idea of chatting and making friends without much focus on Steem-centric conversation or gaining followers and upvotes, a place to just make friends. Many a great steemian checks in from time to time, and the there are the regulars like 
Join us in the Be Awesome chat
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