Steem and Me - 5 Questions Answered After 19 Months On Steemit :)

For me personally, it's the opportunity to express myself, share my opinion, thoughts and experiences. It often comes to my mind how amazing it is that we all have a chance to create posts, share what we feel like sharing and possibly inspire others in some way. No matter if Steemit is all you do or just a getaway place from daily life/job, the fact that we can be ourselves here, with our hobbies, thoughts or passions, is what makes me appreciate this platform a lot.

The second thing would be becoming a part of the community, connecting with like-minded people and being able to learn/find out something new and get inspired. Steemit is covering a big number of people and a large scale of topics and posts so I feel that anyone can find something interesting for themselves and interact with creators.

I guess the first thing is that the proportion of quality posts and payouts a lot of times is not "fair". There's so many incredible content creators who's posts are so underrated. Nowadays, a lot of people are using bots and if the post is good, I don't mind it that much but if the post is one sentense long and it gets to the trending page, I think it's not a great example, for newbies especially, of what this platform is about.

I don't really know what to address as a second complaint, so I'll just say scam and any kind of abuse of Steemit and its users. I know that there's always going to be someone who will try to do that kind of bad things and it's hard to keep it 100% "clean" so I guess all we can do is be careful.

What came to my mind first was creating Zumba challenge, my first and only challenge, at least for now. The response I got was amazing and I enjoyed watching all the entries, from people all over the world, doing Zumba and having fun with it. I promised a round two and I am still planning to do it in the near future.

Joining in and creating my first post on Steemit is still something I remember vividly. I remember where I was at that moment and how I felt. I remember getting welcoming comments and upvotes. I remember all the excitement and thinking how I finally have found a place for me, since I was thinking about blogging at that time.

Stepping out of my comfort zone. Every time I've stepped out of my comfort zone (not only on Steemit) it was a great experience. As someone who is very shy and not good at verbal communication, I have found that writing posts is the best way to express myself. Joining some voice channels on Discord was nerve-wracking for me at first, but then I got used to it. The moment when I wrote and published my first poem was when I realized how wonderful and inspiring Steemit can be, if we just give ourselves a chance to try something new and believe that we are capable of a lot more than we might think.

Focus on the good. Over the time I have been here, I had a few down moments when I felt discouraged or unmotivated and I even wrote some posts about it as I wanted to be honest and share how I felt. My Steemit journey was an incredible journey so far and there was only one short period of time when I was really disappointed in some people but that also turned out to be my biggest lesson. Since then I am focusing my time and energy on the people I think are worth it, people who are positive and their presence here is genuine, true to themselves, raw and honest. It really changed my perspective, made my time and interactions on Steemit a lot more enjoyable again.

This post is not the best, the longest or the one I put the most effort in, but it's a post I have bookmarked on my browser and every now and then I go back to it. Even though I wrote this 10 months ago, it is my own reminder of why I'm here.