Why Are You On STEEMIT - A Minnow Mondays Contest

Why Are You On Steemit??

I had been thinking about joining for a little while. A Facebook friend of mine had posted when she joined Steemit and shared some of her articles and successes on Facebook. She had even posted how she had bought a car because of her Steemit earnings. (In case if you're wondering who @kaylinart She's such a go getter and has made some pretty sound decisions from her time on Steemit) I have been looking for a new job for over a year now. My area has become one of the worst places to live in the US. We're middle on crime. We're low on education. When the regulations on oil drilling were put in place, this town became a ghost town. We have since become a sanctuary city for welfare recipients (when Denver kicks them out because they don't want the problems...they come here). The base pay has gone from $13.00/hr to $9.00/hr but the economy is still set for those working in the oil field making extravagant amounts of money. I had a few other people on Facebook mention moving to Steemit. "You can make A LOT of money!!" I'm a bit of a realist and know nothing works like that.

I decided to create an account and see what I could do with it. I have never been much of a writer. Most of my friends when I would write out my 'rant' post had always said that they liked my writing because 1. it shows how well spoken I am. 2. How passionate I am. That both come through in my writing. Of course I don't see it, but I guess we never truly look at ourselves. I want to inspire, motivate, make people laugh, help people heal. Make people think. The main thing I wanted to accomplish is help remove the stigma with mental health issues. Different ways to work through problems associated it with it. I was diagnosed as a Major Depressive at 20, even though I had not had any ideation or attempts on my life. Yeah I had said things like 'OMG I just want to die." "I can't take this anymore." "I'm tired and I'm tired of being hurt.' That was the extent. 25 years later I had finally learned what is really wrong with me and have actually been taught how to work through all of this. Which is why I started my Mindful series.

While I did get some good feedback and people mentioning that they're looking forward to further postings. I came to a realization about this platform. It's not what you know or what you are trying to accomplish. To get anywhere it's who you know or better yet..who you pay to resteem your stories. I learned that there is a break in the system. Seemingly those who dump money into it, copy and paste content from the internet are the ones who seem to get ahead (this is an observation not true for those that have been here from the beginning).

So I changed my thinking. To make this a journey of discovery. Discovering people, ideas and myself. To get a better idea of how the world is outside my little valley in Colorado. To support people in their journeys. To work with people and groups that want a community, that want to share and have similar interests to me. To help make the platform what it is meant to be not aid those that just friend you for a bot or a follow. In fact, right now I have started weeding through my followers and muting 'bogus' accounts. I am starting to see actual threads. WOW. I can truly see more of the people I chose to follow rather than a bunch of spam. I still have a long way to go, but I'll get there.

My goal is by doing all of this I will grow, the community will grow hopefully with weeding out some of the crap content and if I'm lucky... my pocket book will grow too.

I have so much to learn about how the platform works. I guess, mainly because I have been too lazy to do my 'homework.' I get ideas for posts and it takes time for me to get it presented the way I want. Just like this. I know most people do not have the attention span to read through something lengthy. I admit it, unless you truly catch my attention, I lose interest, which is why most of my posts are pretty short. Just like the avg YouTube video is 15 mins long. If you get much longer than that you might as well stream. YouTubers know this and that is why they limit their time on their videos. Writing on here is much the same way. If you're too long winded, people tune you out. I guess it's the biggest part of knowing your audience.

Thank you for 'listening' and taking the time to read my post.