Thank you so much for your comment and well done to you for the way you've chosen to live your life!
The reason I use bots (and lose my money) is because on the way Steemit works at the moment, it's very hard to get seen otherwise.
When I first joined, there were lots of whales about voting good quality content. Now all their SP is delegated to bots. Even the dolphins have their voting power and SP delegated, so no matter how good your writing, unless you join in the party and pay up, you get lost. It's sad and I'm hoping things might change and become a little easier for everyone to grow on here, but for that we need people with a lot of SP doing actual curation work.