Hey Loves! I've been somewhat offline for the last week. It's been my birthday (31!!) and my little brother's birthday. I've been hanging out with my family, and my girlfriend whom I haven't seen for about a month. So naturally Steemit has taken a back burner for a bit.

I want to hear about your relationship with Steemit.

In relationships, I'm a big believer in talking about EVERYTHING!!!

Obviously, there's a balance, if you only talk with a partner about your fears, doubts, and uncertainty, things probably won't last long. You also need a STRONG vision to be working on together. But, if you never manage to give voice to yours fear, they fester and grow, and your love crumbles from within.

Luckily for us, Steemit is a really badass partner and she's not going to get triggered by anything any one of us has to say. So you might as well lay it all out there.

I'll go first

My romance with Steemit really fired off with a bang! Obsession is not the wrong word here. It has been extremely viscerally exciting, I am often thinking about her. Due to this, I'm going to focus on two pieces.

• First, some of my own doubts, fears, and observations of my own relationship
• Second, some possible visions for the future

I am a big believer that WHY we do something is one of the most important aspects of doing anything. What we're doing, and how we're doing it are interesting as well...but to me the WHY is the holy grail. And one thing that has been very prevalent for me is The Reward. I check my Steemit account habitually, and without fail, one of the FIRST things I do when I go to my blog page is look hopefully towards the post reward to see if it has grown. I've even caught myself looking over all my posts, and scanning the reward to try and make myself feel good about them. If you have any stories or ideas about this, please share with me!!!

Like...look what I did, I made something. There have been a lot of great posts on this subject across Steemit, and this is a challenge for me. I catch myself thinking about how much a post might make when I'm working on it, when I'm thinking about how to do it. And I don't actually like this mindshare, I want to be approaching this from another direction, and it's hard for me.

In this same vein, I have actually met a LOT of really inspiring people on Steemit, people who I admire, and love(You know who you are!!!) And often times I wish I knew how to tell them how inspiring they are...and sometimes I perhaps manage to.

What are we building together?

Another thing about Relationships, is COLLECTIVE WORK, and COLLECTIVE VISION! And Steemit thus far seems to have more of this going on then any other Crypto in the sphere. But it could be so much more. What do we want it to mean to be a Steemian? What are we doing here?!?!? What do we want people from the outside looking in to see?!?!?

I think there could be huge opportunities to contribute to the wellbeing of humanity, and all of our diverse life of our planet...we're starting to rise up, starting a wave, and what will that wave reach for? Will it be a wave of millions of individuals reaching and clawing their way to larger post rewards? Or will we be raising up those who might not currently be able to raise themselves?

Attention.

This is a huge one for me...I am absolutely loving my time on Steemit, and yet, it and thus the post reward has been an object of a lot of my focus over the last month. Ultimately, I want to be living a lot of my life with in the wild, exploring relationship with our non-human relatives, and nurturing the soil. How can Steemit and I have a balanced relationship, where I'm not thinking about her all the time...and instead, I don't even notice 'her', because I'm so in love with all of the ideas and thoughts, and games, and stories coming from her PEOPLE!!??!?!

That being said...there are a lot of folks stuck in shitty jobs out there...and I do believe it's an incredible gift to be able to post about things that you love, that fire up your skin, and pour life into your bones, and receive some kind of income from it. I don't think money is going away tomorrow, and I would much rather see some artists, writers, musicians, programmers, homesteaders, photographers, and so many others starting to build a community that supports them financially and spiritually from their arts then those people stuck working in a job that they hate, serving the misery machine.

But as for myself, I haven't had a very balanced start with Steemit. Also, it's very representative of my own patterns, when I find something I'm excited about, I pour myself into it, quite intensively. I am hoping to be able to re-shape this as my life unfolds...

One more aspect of Attention...I find myself starting to resent some of the more obvious 'weak connections' that are splattered across our community as a whole. Some examples of these are

• the introduction bots posting kind of spammy, look at my shit stuff
• "cool post, come check out my poopy butthole" comments
• the promotion centered environment around Discord/Steemit.chat
• posts about making money on steemit

But perhaps these only bug me because they are overt expressions of my own inner desire to be successful, and receive lots of external feedback, applause, glory, admiration, whatever.

So here's the deal the today you gorgeous radical Steemin human beans...I want your help in shaping my relationship to Steemit.

If you feel inspired, please share with me some of your own relationship with Steemit...doubts, challenges, gratitudes, everything goes.

I will toss every comment with an oz of thought and feeling into a hat, and randomly choose one. Additionally, I will personally choose one that I find most vulnerable/honest/inspiring. Each winner will receive 100SBD + 50% of this post reward. (if for some reason, this post gets massive upvotes, I will break this down into 3 or 4 winners instead of 2)

Last, but not least, I want each of you to nominate ONE PERSON on Steemit who is focused on encouraging, uplifting, appreciating, and building up OTHERS over themselves.

These entries will also be tossed into a hat, and I will randomly draw one, and personally choose one. Each winner will receive a 5000SP delegation from me for three weeks, to help them ply their trade :P

100% of your upvotes go out as rewards here, so don't be shy =)