"Why am I here?" - Because it's been a great journey!

This is a little response to marky's initiative "Why am I here?"

I joined Steem back in September 2017 and it was my first real interaction with a blockchain. At that time Bitcoin was constantly rising to newer highs which just seemed impossible by any standards. Naturally, this peaked my interest in cryptos. What are they? What is a blockchain? How did it work? Is this all just hype? Asking these questions of course is just the beginning and as many of you know this is a road down the crypto rabbit hole which entails a steep learning curve and an attempt to figure "everything" out and make sense of this new world.

One of my first posts on this blockchain was a traveling blog post which surprise, surprise, didn't receive any attention. I was stumped; nobody really took interest and of course the payout was 0. This was especially frustrating since there were many posts that just posted a picture and a couple of words and got a huge payout (little did I know about votebots etc. back then...) But I didn't give up and tried to find my way by experimenting with different kinds of posts (writing, art, photography, crpytos etc.).

However, as I discovered like others before me, it wasn't necessarily the payouts that kept me going, but rather the experience of overcoming challenges and reinventing oneself. I tried to make a post every other day and I naturally wondered what I should blog about. Who was my audience? What was it that I was trying to say? And why? These kinds of questions challenged me to produce new content and kept the creative juices flowing. I liked to write and this was an opportunity to challenge myself to improve my skills. While the financial success was minimal, I really liked to come up with new post ideas and I also started to get more involved with the community, which I learned was perhaps the most important part of being here, especially once we got communities/tribes on the chain (with leofinance, photography, and of course LTC being one of my favorites).

I have noticed that all of this time spent here has been a journey of discovery and learning and while there were many times I wanted to give up it was in hindsight one of the best things I could have done in my free time. Often I went outside to take pictures of people and things and I thought about what story I could tell with them. I think that I also improved my writing skills by maintaining a blog and finally I came up with the idea of the "Love the Clouds" contest which has been the biggest success in terms of community engagement. I really love how so many of you are sharing this love for the clouds and nature and that we can share it here!

I hope that Hive will continue to develop and attract many more users as I think there is so much potential here. Especially in terms of how the internet is heading down a path of centralization and censorship. We have a real opportunity here to change things!