Image modified using a picture by NoName_13 from Pixabay
I was inspired by thisismylife's recent blogging challenge on @liketu, 'The 30 Pictures 30 Stories Challenge'.
They were originally inspired by rubencress '30 day not-so ordinary ordinary items challenge' and I find both challenges a great way to encourage daily posting on hive.
This challenge is pretty open-ended; please feel free to follow my formula, or thisismylife's or rubencress' challenge structures listed in their posts linked above 🔼
The only stipulations are that you post one picture a day with a personal story attached to it for 30 days.
Write your story/anecdote to the best of your ability, and use the tag #30stories and/or the #notsoordinary tag if you're following rubencress' challenge. It is also advised to use the #challenge tag.
Today I am doing something a little different as @freecompliments asked me to post a poem I'd written to their (very new) community, along with a short anecdotal blog about how the poem came about, my struggles with mental health and suicidal thoughts throughout my life.
I have actually written a 5600-word article about suicide, suicidal ideation, and self-harm and how these issues are very often linked to some level of trauma, PTSD or transference of either of these conditions from living closely with/to a victim of abuse.
But as I explained to @freecompliments that article is being submitted to magazines and even to a few newspapers in my country of origin. It isn't right for hive, and even if it were highly rewarded it deals with issues that could potentially trigger people.
From looking at @freecompliments introduction post I can see that they have migrated from Reddit due to political issues, censorship and centralized authorities there limiting their efforts.
I saw that many people on the internet were unhappy and could use a boost – and there I was, capable of giving a simple compliment to help someone out. My compliments started out simple, superficial, and direct. I learned over time how to customize and add a bit of meaning to the compliments, because a good compliment is specific to the individual.
Source: freecompliments intro post
As I read through their post I could see that basically after spending 4.5 years building a community on Reddit, they were heavily censored and the meaning of the community was destroyed through the actions of moderators, eventually being stolen as their username was removed from the mods list.
They are a physician (I am guessing the equivalent of a general practicioner (GP) of medicine in the UK where I'm from) in a city in America.
I’m a resident physician in a big city in the Northeast US. Additionally, I have some educational background in economics. I’m also a lover of art, fitness, old movies, and healthy eating. Hopefully I can sometimes provide useful input on those topics.
Source: freecompliments intro post
As far as I can tell this person is a genuine individual who wants to help bring some love and cheer to a small part of the internet which we all know can be a very insular existence.
Over time, I saw that the Reddit administrators decided that this community was giving them a better reputation, and they implanted power-moderators (i.e. those who held significant influence within the website and would impose their views, bans upon people, and censor whatever they did not like whenever they felt like it) to run the community. After this implementation, the community grew to over 250,000 members due to the website’s promotion algorithms (isn’t that ironic?). It also lost much of the heart that it had when I was around. Censorship intensified, and discussion was stifled. My baby, which I had worked upon for 4 ½ years, had transformed into something I could not recognize.
And the cherry on top of the cake… in 2021, my username was removed from the founder’s list. They had managed to remove most traces of my account’s existence and take credit for the work I’d done. It was my final straw with the aforementioned website.
Source: freecompliments intro post
At this point, I would offer a piece of essential advice (given that I built and ran a successful community The Ink Well for a year before I had to hand it over to others due to health issues) to help @freecompliments run into similar issues as they did on Reddit. While hive is nowhere near as centralized as Reddit, there are a few entities (groups) who can and will destroy a community (or community owner account) if they deem their behaviour to be detrimental to the hive ecosystem. One is @spaminator whose account can be found here and @hivewatchers whose account can be found here.
Hivewatchers are undeniably the most powerful anti-abuse account on hive, dealing with plagiarists, spam comment farming and outright AI-generated blogs which habitually take from the reward pool while providing little to no value - they do an essential and difficult job.
Spaminator however is an account that could cause some issues given the nature of the freecompliments community. The reason being that the whole purpose of Spaminator is to downvote what they deem to be spam comments, and their definition seems to be pretty loose to me, although I haven't really looked into it. I have just noticed people with Spaminator auto-downvoting their comments that I wouldn't expect to see as the user seemed genuine.
My personal suggestion would be to start some type of posting initiative within the freecompliments community., perhaps asking people to share stories of hope, how they surmounted sadness or depression similar to this post I'm writing, and then offering upvotes to the comments made on those posts.
This is one idea, many others could be thought up, I think the distinction I'm trying to make here is that Spaminator only go after people who only comment as there have been a lot of problems on hive (and steem before the community hardfork) of commenters leaving generic low-quality comments to farm votes on them. This is why Spaminator exists at all, and with your current strategy you could fall afoul of them and I simply don't know how open they are to discussion. It could be perfectly fine once they understand the concept and operations of your community, I just don't know.
During the pandemic, I spent over two months without leaving my apartment as my mother developed lung cancer in the two years leading up to the covid outbreak, and it was my job to drive her to chemotherapy & immunotherapy appointments. No one else could do this job and I literally couldn't risk getting covid while I was around her (even though I did three times and caught it using LTF tests early enough not to infect her) as she'd have died if she'd got covid, it is that simple. Covid would have killed her given her already immuno-comprimised state and severe lung cancer.
Covid deniers need to keeep their mouths shut at this point if they're thinking of wading in with comments, even if I'm 100% wrong and it was all a big conspiracy, the risk was not worth taking. This type of isolation taught me one thing, despite being an introvert and a jobbing writer, even I could get cabin fever.
I'd regularly spent 3-4 weeks in isolation quite happily before the pandemic writing and getting on with other tasks, but...
“We are our choices.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
Choice is the defining factor here, you don't know how important it is until you have no choice. Until you literallly have to make the a choice between lonliness and potentially killing someone you love, that is no choice.
During those eight weeks I spoke to no one other than my mother who was quite uncomunicative due to the ravages of a combined regigme of chemo and immunotherapy, I commented (and posted) sporadically on hive and if I'm 100% honest, through the fear of losing yet another relative, and a severe disc flare up, I became addicted to pain pills (I have a prolapsed disc that flares up with extreme pain every few years) and alcohol.
It was during my own self-enforced taper off both the pills and booze that I happened upon a half written poem called 'Finding Hope in the Eye of the Storm'. I wasn't happy with the title, and I certainly wasn't happy with the poems first draft, but as I shivered wrapped in my blanket, battling a depression that was deep in the bedrock (as at this point it looked like my mum was fading fast and would die), the poem just came flowing out of me.
I was experiencing suicidal thoughts at that time, but both the focus it took to write the poem and the words that inevitably came forth, those thoughts were dispelled.
There wasn't one word of this poem that was the same as the origonal first draft, it held a certain similar feeling, but all of those verses flowed in one draft, remained unchanged, in elegy to my friend Matt, my grandparents and all who have passed from my life.
The poem is called Hope's Elegy, and many on hive may have seen it before as I have shared it in the past. But this poem of hope, despite the seeming oxymoron title shows the duality of hope. After all, my mother defied all expectation and her cancer shrank to a managable level where she can live a meaningful and relatively pain-free life. You see, hope is an ever-replicating ideal, a concept that can both hurt and heal. Ultimately though, without hope, this world wouldn't function.
I beleive that even our animal cousins hope when they first lick their cubs clean. I beleive that there is a strange mingled hope in the complex interactions witnessed on a reef betweeen the symbiosis of coral algea/animal and the myriad of fish species that make these coral gardens their nurseries.
I even beleive there is hope in the constant inteplay of life and death, prey and predation, and even... if we can only figure out how to nurture what is right infront of us pysically in our world, and nurture our inner psychological subconcious myths, there is hope.
Hope is our future and our past,
it will endure and outlast the human condition.
Hope is the birth of the seed's toil
that springs renewed from rain kissed soil.
Source: my poem Hope's elegy
Thanks for reading 🌿
All photos and media design used in this post are my own.
Camera: Samsung S7 Smart Phone.
To see more of my poetry please visit my YouTube channel Mainly Poetry.
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