How Steemit Changed My Life - Part One

gonzo (69)in #writing • 8 years ago (edited)

Last week I landed in London to meet the girl of my dreams and it is all thanks to Steemit and all the wonderful friends I have met here, this is my story.

When I first came to Steemit I was just your average American suffering from Cerebral Palsy, HPPD and low testosterone, with a healthy addiction to opiates, GHB, sleeping pills, etc... which I took to alleviate the pain of CP. I was also still experiencing vertigo from some bad MDMA that I taken six months earlier to alleviate the crippling PTSD that I had been suffering with for some time.

My Steemit goal was to write some stories about drugs and science fiction while sharing nothing personal about myself because I'm not proud of my illnesses and have been hiding them from people my whole life. However writing long posts is very painful for me, since my hands are impaired, one 60% and the other 40%, so I thought that it would be good for me to learn to write poetry.

My first poem had a decent payout, but deep down I knew that it probably wasn't even a poem. I didn't know what the hell I wrote, but everyone seemed to like it except for one person, @cathi-xx who pointed out the obvious, that it wasn't a poem and on top of that she hated the protagonist, although she did say that it was well-written, which I found confusing and pleasing.

I immediately checked out her two poems and they were really good, but she had no pictures and like the vast majority of newcomers, her posts were being ignored by the community. The directness of her reply carried all the signs of a crazy person, but she seemed to know what she was talking about.

I wondered if she was stable enough to teach me the difference between a poem and whatever it was that I had been writing. So, I was faced with a decision, I could berate a new, person for ranting in my comments, or try to help her in hopes of being a poet too.

Then I remembered how isolated I felt when I was new and my posts went unnoticed and I thought that she probably felt the same and wouldn't stick around for long if nothing changed. The isolation didn't leave me until I found steemit.chat so I invited @cathi-xx to chat several times and asked if she wanted help adding pictures to her posts, but she didn't seem interested.

I began thinking of how good it made me feel when @knozaki2015 saw me struggling to get people to read my post and he sent me 5 SBD so I decided to forward the 5 SBD to @cathi-xx. The next morning I woke up to find that she had joined chat and was thanking me for the 5 SBD and I began explaining the importance of pictures on Steemit.

However, due to the drugs I completely forgot that I sent her 5 SBD, so I later forwarded another 5 SBD to @begennintoend, when he was new to show him that we value his poetry too. So, there I was teaching people HTML and in return they were teaching me poetry. Somehow, in the middle of all this my alter ego, Oznog, emerged on the Steemit Talk Podcast. There I was just minding my own business, trolling a podcast, while high on opiates and a mascot was born.

Before I knew it Thanksgiving rolled around and I left for two weeks to visit family who take turns bombarding me with loaded questions and career and relationship advice while they balanced on their high horses.

Their judgmental overtones never once taking into account that people with CP just aren't suited for manual labor. When I returned home I felt like such a failure, as usual, and it didn't help that I had been strung out on painkillers for the last 15 years which no one knew.

Depression began to take hold and my poetry became so abysmal that I could no longer bare to write it. I knew I had only one option: quietly leave Steemit, without saying goodbye to my friends, so that I could avoid the lies I would be compelled to tell in order to avoid truthful humiliation.

I would slowly wean myself off opiates and play Fallout 4 for a few hours each day until the desperate nerves in my hands began sending panicked messages up my spinal column, pleading with me to stop the abuse with all that button pushing. When the pain became too intolerable I would take GHB and binge watch TV shows, while waiting for that faithful day when I would get to disappoint more relatives at Christmas.

Christmas came and went with only a few comments about how lazy I am and how if I decide to become a good person God might stop smiting me, but strangely it didn't have any affect on me. I was only taking a fourth of my normal dose of opiates and I felt happy because I knew that I was making progress, regardless of their weird, unrealistic plans for me. I really wanted to reconnect with my you guys so as soon as I got home from my two week stint of visiting relatives less charming than the villains from every Disney film, I raced over to my PC to get back on Steemit.

I soon realized that over the last two months most of my friends had left Steemit, even @cathi-xx had left. Until Thanksgiving we had spoken on chat almost everyday, usually until my hands hurt so bad from hours of typing that I wouldn't be able to use them the next day. I even opened up to her about my past in all it's gory detail. Like how I spent a few years in a cult (someday I might do a post on this) and we watched a documentary about the cult together, which was very therapeutic for me.

It was very strange to not have her support, to have her look over my posts and to bounce ideas off. I sent her a message, but she wasn't even logging into chat anymore. I started writing poetry again and @begennintoend tried repeatedly to teach me how to write minimalist poetry but my ADD kept getting in the way.

I couldn't believe the reception I received when I returned to The Steemit Talk Podcast, they even named the episode “The Return of Oznog.” After the show I met @sirlunchthehost who explained that Oznog was some sort of celebrity but I'm still not sure if that's true. I began to hang out with him, @beanz and @giftedgaia chatting and playing late night poker. Then out of nowhere I received a message from @cathi-xx on chat.

Link to Part Two

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#love #life #steemit #introduceyourself