Here's an insomniac, me, I'll explain why Steemit is on my brain every waking moment and in my dreams. Here's my drawings too. I didn't know I could draw until one day during college math class, I began doodling.

I CAN'T SLEEP BECAUSE OF STEEMIT

The most sleep I can get is 4 hours because I've entered the virtual world of Steemit and I've definitely lost my grip on the "real" world as I think that Steemit is the real world that I have dreamed about existing a long time ago when I first discovered the internet and began building my very first website called "Wrongland".

I built my first website around 2002 and taught myself HTML. I remember coding onmouseovers. There's a reason that this reminds me of those early days. My website was experimental in nature and I would make hidden web pages that only a truly dedicated would ever find. On these hidden webpages existed gifts. If someone found the hidden thing, an onmouseover would display messages like,

"YOU'VE FOUND THE HIDDEN PLASTIC SANDWICH".

The site would then instruct them to give me their shipping address so they could receive the free plastic sandwich.
A guy who received that plastic sandwich over 14 years ago still has the sandwich prominently displayed on a table in his house. Read the full story of the plastic sandwich and my friend Elam here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-friend-bought-mr-hot-nuts-leah-stephens?redirectFromSplash=true

We are now friends, having met in the digital world so many years ago when he just happened to somehow find my Wrongland website. I think we were Myspace friends at the time. There was experimentation and loads of creativity in those early days. I'm reminded of those early days because at that time, I was doing coding, enough to get by, and now here on Steemit, I'm also doing a bit of coding, enough to get by also.

I'm reminded of the free creativity of the past but I'm simultaneously reminded of the future of human evolution. I believe that this is what the internet should have been, but was corrupted by the hierarchal greed system of enslavement and violence. Even though this system contains a hierarchy, at least regular people have a chance of benefitting from their creative output.

The current system that we're living in is an extractive one. It is based in the slave system. Those at the top extract as much energy/work/activity/output from those at the bottom and profit from it. It's violence and it's similar to clear cutting a forest, creating paper from the trees and leaving the dead stumps behind. We are the stumps. I've had every conceivable job on the planet: from high fashion model to factory worker. Almost all my jobs were based on this extractive system and many of my jobs left me a stump. I realized many years ago what was going on when I began to lift my head out of the fog.

I studied everyone who was changing the world, and I don't mean people working on superficial things like smartphone apps. I mean Vandana Shiva, the scientist who opened my eyes to the reality of the extractive and monocropping mindset of our current world that is fundamentally based on slavery and violence. Most patriarchal systems operate this way.

Nature and women are viewed as commodities to exploit in our current system.

They are viewed as inert mass. It's only when the paper company clear cuts the forest that the company is seen as "productive" and starts to show up on our markets. The stumps are left to rot, and all the creatures who once inhabited the forest are left to die. No care is given to the creatures. Life is wiped out so that as much profit can be extracted as possible.

Nature actually provides us with everything we need to live and more. It took me 41 years to grasp this concept.

Once you realize that the men who created the suburban sprawl neighborhoods without designing food forests to be an integral part of the housing developments, you realize that scarcity is designed into the fabric of our lives. Food forests, if planned into the developments would create so many benefits, both to humans and our nature friends like bees, etc.

So why were food forests not designed into our living spaces? The men who created the housing developments want us to buy our food at the grocery stores. They want us to be dependent on a system so that we become mere consumers of goods, not free-thinking people with stories to tell and creative lives to live. Everyone is creative. You've been lied to. Everyone is born creative, but it is systematically snuffed out of us. It was nearly snuffed out of me. I was told by a teacher that I could not draw. I believed her. It was not until college, when by accident i started doodling because i was bored in math class. It was in this math class that I discovered I had an intense well of creativity inside of me. More than I knew what to do with. My drawings came to me during this time, when I was 21 years old. I am self-taught 100%.

Being dependent on a system for everything makes you a slave. You get a mortgage which enslaves you in a job. You get college debt which makes you an easy slave for the giant corps to abuse. Being vulnerable and resource-starved is part of our current system. Its very nature is designed to extract your creative energy and your spirit, and turn that into a product that benefits someone else, not you.

Once your mind has lifted itself out of the man-made extractive system and can see clearly what's going on, a wave of horror spreads across your consciousness. Horror because you realize you've been living in someone else's narrow and greedy view of reality, not the reality that exists in your free-thinking and beautiful mind.

Each revelation leads to another more horrific revelation as you see that an entire world is fighting for dominance over resources. Your terror continues as you learn that Terminator seeds have been designed by human beings which have removed the life-giving part of the seeds, so that farmers will be forced to buy the seeds (owned by a corp) over and over, each year, instead of saving the seeds, which they have done for millennia. You see, nature provides everything we need. It is man who restricts the flow of both energy and resources. Nikola Tesla taught me that.

A careful study of Nikola Tesla will reveal all these horrors. I only read Tesla's book, My Inventions this year. I listened to it on audiobook about 4 times. It's brilliant.

Tesla also predicted the coming wave of free energy to the masses. The internet was supposed to usher in this free distribution of energy but it didn't truly happen. The forces at the top were too strong. The elites have too much power. They are scared, I think, of the coming freeing of thought that can no longer be snuffed out.

But now there are new intelligent elites who actually embody the spirit of Nikola Tesla. You know who I"m talking about. I don't even have to say his name. These elites are restructuring power, making it available in ways only Tesla envisioned. This gives hope to all. Now it's personal responsibility time. It's time to look inside and see how we can change first ourselves, then other things. It starts with a radical self inventory.

Once you've done the research I have, your mind begins to shift in a radical way. You realize you can't be someone else's slave and that you must do something to change the extractive system. It's hard but you must have hope in order to function and not blow your brains out. Humans are delicate in regards to emotions. It's easy to be irrational once you've learned the true nature of the system that seeks your enslavement at every turn. My consciousness has been shifting since I found this site. Its reawakening those first glimpses of what the internet could be and this site is coming at the right time since I've been actively working on freeing my mind over the course of three years.

Sometimes it is the crazy people who end up showing the rest of the crowd where the door is.

The weird thing about me waking up is that it didn't truly happen until 2011 during the most depressing and horrific part of my life. I've had it relatively easy, though, so I'm not saying that I have had a rough life. But a terrible life event triggered a part of my mind that had been mostly dormant before: being psychologically victimized by a man. This event changed my entire outlook on the world and allowed me to see "reality" as it truly is for most of the world's population. My delusional thinking (for the most part) ended and I started on a new path to discover the truth as it is, not how someone wants me to see it.

I know see that the painful lesson served an important purpose: to show me the suffering of the world and to help find ways of restructuring the power system. It is only through suffering that we are able to feel the suffering of another. When you don't experience any suffering in your life, you're not able to relate to most of the world. Life is a battle for resources at the heart. When you are given more resources than you need, and you hoard them, you actually end up taking from the rest of humanity. It may not feel this way, but it's true.

I'm not suggesting you give away your resources, but your energy can be directed towards those who need it, and deserve it, as a way to balance out the imbalance. I would need to write another post about this idea. I have it fleshed out in my mind, but it requires too many words. The reason I feel that I'm qualified to write on this topic is that I've been both wealthy and poor. It makes me uniquely positioned to understand both mindsets.

But, I've been impoverished for most of my adulthood, so I relate to poverty more than wealth. So, what do i mean by poverty? In 2011, me and my daughter lived on $10,000 for an entire year.

This occurred as a result of a number of things colliding: pregnancy-> psychological abuse from a boyfriend->panic->overstress->raising a new life form-> lack of resources->single motherhood->poverty->depression->suicidal ideation->waking up->research on system of world->less panic but reality of system is terrifying->recovery from abuse->still poor and with debts->present moment right now. I'm lucky to be alive in some respects.

A lot of people feel disgust when they look at my drawings. I don't censor my mind when I draw and I have little control over what emerges from it. I use automatic drawing techniques as a form of pure thoughts revealed on paper. It's the contents of my mind, and from these you see a lot of disruption. This is the raw stuff, the conflicts that go on in my subconscious. Each has a story, and I know a little of what was causing the emotional discord, but I'll leave it to you to find your own meaning.

For most it's terrifying to go deep into their own subconscious world of discord. For, me, it's a way I keep alive. Without constantly expressing the unknown within my mind, I would be more lost than I am now.

Feeling lost, though, is a familiar and exhilirating feeling. Being on a treadmill of 9-5 is not being alive.

I want to be alive, even if that means i show the world the contents of my subconscious that is constantly waging a battle. That is reality, more so than the fake one that has so far been created by a few elites, who had a bad vision of what humanity could be like.

The energy inside of you, just like nature is abundant beyond your wildest dreams. It gives without clocking in.
The 9-5 world is dead, as far as I'm concerned.
End of first Steemit rant-philosophical-sleep-deprived-thoughts-on-"reality"

ps--I refer to the stink ant and my feelings about Steemit are positive, so this metaphor would be better, but it relates to how something external can sort of change an entire organism's way of behaving... Here's info about the stink ant:

"Our planet's rain forests - rich matrices of life which exist primarily in tropical regions - provide us with unique opportunity to observe life in all of its manifold and perplexing beauty. Most rain forests date back some two to three hundred million years. This extreme age has allowed many unusual and complex relationships to develop among the inhabitants of these tropical ecosystems.
In the rain forest of the Cameroon in West Central Africa lives a floor dwelling ant known as Megaloponera foetens, or more commonly, the stink ant. This large ant - one of the very few to produce a cry audible to the human ear - lives by foraging for food among the fallen leaves and undergrowth of the extraordinarily rich rain forest floor.

On occasion one of these ants, while looking for food is infected by inhaling a microscopic spore from a fungus of the genus Tomentella. After being inhaled, the spore seats in the ant's tiny brain and begins to grow, causing changes in the ant's patterns of behavior. The Ant appears troubled and confused; for the first time in its life the ant leaves the forest floor and begins to climb.

Driven on by the growth of the fungus, the ant embarks on a long and exhaustive climb. Completely spent and having reached a prescribed height, the ant impales the plant with its mandibles. Thus affixed, the ant waits to die. Ants that have met their ends in this fashion are quite common in some sections of the forest.

The fungus continues to consume first the nerve cells and finally all the soft tissue that remains of the ant. After approximately two weeks a spike appears from what had been the head of the ant. This spike is about an inch and a half in length and has a bright orange tip heavy with spores which rain down onto the rain forest floor for other unsuspecting ants to inhale." -Museum of Jurassic Technology http://www.mjt.org/exhibits/stinkant.htm