How Did I Discover Steemit? How Did You?

I was struggling hard with money earlier this year (and for awhile before that). This was in large part due to: moving from Barcelona to Mexico City with my boyfriend and my dog, and in the midst of that thinking my dog had cancer because of a horrible vet, leading to a ridiculous amount of money spent. Plus other things, life things, that just led to my financial situation worsening out of my control. I imagine many can relate to this.

In June 2017, my best friend, @kindstranger (a joy billionaire, another Jessica, a person who taught me how to be warm, a beautiful and talented designer and editor of all things digital, my partner in soul sharing and, as it happens, in business) told me there was this website that pays you for up votes that she had heard about through a co-worker randomly.

Here is a picture of me in June, keeping it together on the outside, falling apart within:

I had taken to being a camgirl at this point to try to get out of the hole, to avoid having to ask my parents for money, and I know some people have good experiencing camming, but I grew to absolutely hate it. Masturbating on the screen for money, pretending that I liked it, making up stories these men wanted to hear—the whole thing made me feel sick. I would watch my boyfriend look at me with sad eyes when I would do it, wishing there was some other way, because he knew how doing it made me feel sick, in mind and in body.

So, of course I jumped on it when my friend mentioned Steemit to me. I am a writer. I even have an MFA in writing to prove it (just kidding, that doesn’t prove much). But I am a writer, I say so now, because of all my writing, all my studying, all my work toward being a writer. Because inside me, writing really helps make me feel like the whole me. When I’m not writing, something is missing, something essential.

That’s also part of the reason I’m poor. I decided to go on a different path, an entrepreneurial one, a traveling one, one where no one tells me where I have to be and when I can come and go. Something inside of me just doesn’t let me live that other way without getting depressed, emptied and emptied until I’m just a collection of holes I’m looking to fill. Not even in a sexual way. Just in a metaphysical way. In a metaphorical way. Since I’ve had my MFA, I’ve mostly done freelance writing, some part-time tutoring to college kids with their essays, some freelance editing. I’ve lived in a few different countries and many cities. It was fine before I had debt, but any accidents or vet bills or medical bills or anything, and that fantasy world was cracked. Well, yeah, life is that way, so it cracked.

So, yeah, I checked it out, this thing called Steemit, and it seemed pretty cool. I knew about cryptocurrency in a basic way, and had a bunch of friends with Bitcoins (though at the time they were mostly using them as a way to buy drugs off the dark web). Still, it was tangible enough to me. To this day, my head isn’t completely wrapped around where the money comes from, but I guess that is also kind of true for any money. Whenever I get sad about money, I have a friend that tells me, remember Jessica, money is not real. My mind finds poetry more tangible than money, philosophically speaking; that’s just how I work inside I guess.

I was kind of afraid Steemit would be too much like Reddit, which isn’t really my thing, but it turned out it wasn’t, that It was more of a community. And my first posts did ok. I had a low-moderate response to my intro post, but still, that was encouraging to me. Plus, I was learning a lot about the community through reading posts, getting to know people, learning plenty of other things, finding other artists, you name it. Steemit, I knew, was definitely a place for me, so I kept writing.

Not long in, I decided to open up about my life as a camgirl, which you can read here. I’m pretty sure it was mainly thanks to @itchykitten that my post BLEW UP. At one point, in the first couple days, it had made over $1000. FOR ONE POST! He re-steemed and gave me some whale tokens and the next thing I knew, BAM SHALAM godDAMN. Thank you so much, @itchykitten for helping me in my early Steemit days not so long ago, for making me realize the potential of Steemit, and for getting me truly hooked on such a brilliant concept and platform (I really do love this place, and now that my college tutoring is slowing down for winter break, I will be here a lot more).

None of my other posts have been even near that level of earnings, which at first made me wonder if I should only be writing about sex (because I was really needing the money), and I did a little bit. I wrote some more cam stories, and those were my most popular. I think more than it just being about sex though, is that I am an open person and I don’t mind sharing things that most don’t like sharing. I think transparency is a necessary part of my satisfaction with life. That’s the thing that made those stories more popular than my others, in my opinion. It’s harder to come by good writing about taboo topics, especially for free on the internet. What do you think? Am I right about this?

I’ve been posting a lot lately about my physiopoetry project Skin on Sundays lately because that has been what has been consuming most of my time along with my tutoring job. That has also taken off in recent months, and I’ve started getting paid by brands (of my choosing, ones that align with my values and fit with my content) to mention them in posts. It is a really cool way to make money, being an Influencer on Instagram, if you maintain quality and integrity by only posting for brands you actually support. Plus, it means more people will see their brand, and because I only post ethical/brilliant/amazing ones, that’s such a good thing.

I do plan to start varying my posts a bit more, not just focusing on poetry. Poetry is such a huge part of my world though, so it will never disappear. Not even close :) And since my last day of tutoring for the semester is Thursday, I will be focusing a lot more time being an active part of this Steemit community of sharers and lovers and investors and believers. I will also invest a bit of energy into getting my loved ones into the community here.

Actually, a close friend of mine, @amyinautumn just posted her first post the other day. She’s ridiculously warm and intelligent and her life is wily-er than any coyote, so I can’t wait for her account to get the love it deserves as she posts more and more. Now, I’m working on getting my amazingly talented boyfriend to sign up and start writing. He’s close. He’s a musician and spends a lot of his time researching and learning music-related things, so he thinks he doesn’t have time for Steemit. But I think he does, and I think he’s going to be here very soon.

Also, I want to mention @firepower here. I read his awesome post about how he got into Steemit, and it inspired me to write my own, because it really made me think about how much good it has added to my life in these six months (a perfect example of the of the powers of the Steemit community, actually!).

xoxo, and as always, thanks for listening, if you’re listening,

@jessandthesea (follow me if you dare!)