Hey everyone. I am new to the SteemIt community and wanted to introduce myself. My name is John and I am in my mid 30s.
I have been wanting to join SteemIt for about six months, and just haven’t had the courage to do it. Why am I scared? Well, everyone has a life story, and I am here to tell mine. There are a lot of things in my life that made me who I am today, but many were traumatizing at the time. I look back and say I wouldn’t change a thing, but do I really know any different?
I have lived a bit of an extraordinary life, been through a lot of extraordinary situations and overcame a lot of things that could have made my life much worse, if I would have continued down the paths I was on.
My mentors have encouraged me to start writing a book about my life experiences, and I have been wanting to in hopes that it will help others. It is very difficult for me to sit down with a word processor and try to get everything in one place and it not be a complete mess, and that is one reason why I chose the SteemIt platform. I can post bits and pieces and logically be able to look back and place things in the right order for when I do publish a book (whether it be in the next year or the next five or ten years).
I want to be challenged by peers on the platform to make me think of things and face some of these situations that I don’t care to visit much anymore.
I want to share my experiences on having a fully disabled sibling that could not communicate, how it drove my parents apart, how her death changed everyone even throughout the extended family. Essentially, living with a fully disabled sibling, and how it impacted our family before her death and after.
I want to share my experiences of growing up with mentally ill parents, the journey through my mother’s pancreatic cancer and my father’s leukemia. I want to share my journey through the military, poor choices made there, my alcohol and drug dependence through life. Being homeless for sometime. I want to share about all the trouble my friends and I got in before the age of 18, and being a missing person that had a Missing Persons Report filed on. My experiences of blaming myself for all of this, never asking for any help when I needed a counselor, and much more.
I want to share how overcoming these life long battles have propelled me to be successful in life, and also have a wonderful wife and daughter.
Overcoming life's challenges!!
But most of all, I want to share how I turned all of that around. I would like to be able to help others. I want others to be able to share their stories and help find refuge together.
So, thank you SteemIt for being the platform it is. I look forward to being a part of it. Thanks everyone.
