My 2018: Achievements and Failures - This year has been a rollercoaster ride for sure!

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I totally missed this contest

Yesterday morning I found a notification from Gina that @anomadsoul had published a new post so I made myself a cup of coffee and started reading it. Apparently, I totally missed him announcing a contest about achievements and failures of 2018. Because boy, this is one I do need to participate in. I have so much to share that I don't even know where to start, and how to write some things down.

I need to find back my writing flow

Lately, I haven't been feeling my powerful self and it's pretty frustrating as I feel like I'm delivering half work and I'm not satisfied with anything I finish at the moment. Therefore most of my articles I start writing, end up unfinished waiting for the moment that I'm in that flow again. This post wasn't any different, by the way. Such a shame, because I started this year writing my ass off! I can honestly say that I was a full-time blogger when this year started. Things have changed, for the good and bad. But this too shall pass... This is going to be a long write up with probably a lot of tears while writing. Forgive me for spelling errors, I just really need to get it off my chest, and I have one hour left before the deadline when I'm finishing this post. But thanks to this contest, I finally actually wrote something again, so thanks for getting me out of my comfort zone again!

Full-time blogger

In January I started writing for the @familyprotection community to share my experiences in Holland regarding CPS (Child Protective Services) and where the first part of the story I wrote didn't even reach a dollar payout, part two hit $205! Thanks to the supportive and kindest person @canadian-coconut (and all you other supportive writers and followers too!) I remember freaking out as I first experienced refreshing my article and seeing a huge payout. And not long after it got above 200 dollars and I was going through the roof! It was not until 6 months later (lol) I found out the huge other vote came from @curie, I had no idea back then. I was still a clueless Steemian that only knew how to write my story down, and for the rest Steemit was one big questionmark to me at that point.

But I do know that that huge support made me feel confident and strong enough to keep sharing parts of my story, the story of losing everything in Holland, getting homeless while pregnant, my two oldest children (shit here come the tears again) that now live with their horrible father that tried bringing me down many times. Holland has a negative load for me, there's a dark shadow hanging above Holland filled with the darkest memories and things I want to forget. Thanks to @canadian-coconut and the familyprotection community support on my articles I was not afraid to share my story. For the first time in several years I was heard, and I got supported by strangers where the past years the only one supporting me was my boyfriend. Nobody could understand those things that happened to us, and Steemit became my canvas to share, and to heal. Steemit has been the best therapy I could ever get. Period. I needed to write because I needed to heal myself, so I did, months in a row, day in day out. Until I couldn't do it anymore. Because I felt that I couldn't only focus on those painful things anymore, I needed to take opportunities when they came to focus on things I love too, and so I did. But there is still a lot of pain inside and I feel the urge to continue my writing about it, but the important thing that I wanted to share is all the above, if it wasn't for Steemit and the support I got, maybe I would now not be who I am today. I will start 2019 stronger than I started 2018 thanks to many of you! Thank you! <3

Finding our own apartment in Budapest

Finally settling down in Budapest (after 4 months no own rental place and living out of a suitcase!) at the last day of January. Living out of a suitcase is fine, I've learned to deal with that (one of the advantages of losing everything is you can be satisfied with little things easily) but not having a place to call home got to me, and I wanted to have that so badly for our daughter. So when we finally left our last place we stayed (a nice AirBnb) and moved by tram (that's easy with a few suitcases lol) to our apartment I was so happy. We have lived like a bunch of students until June with only the basics as we only could afford to buy the furniture that was in the apartment (sold by one of the two girls that lived here). They shared the apartment, and the girl we bought everything from lived in the livingroom. So we basically started having a bed, some closets with drawers, a desk, a small table and 2 chairs. (We do have a small table and chairs in the kitchen that come with the house luckily) We used our bedroom as a laundry and storage for our suitcases and when we wanted to watch tv, we used my laptop to watch something. As I did pretty well on Steemit I had saved up quite a bit, so in June we finally got our couch, wardrobe and tv. Finally, it really felt like home!

My passport application got refused

I've written quite some posts about these obstacles that we've overcome in the end about my passport application. Long story short, Holland apparently put my data on an alert so when I would apply for a passport/ID card I would got refused. They were talking about a debt that wasn't even our fault and should have been dismissed of the amount of
€ 16.000 so I felt like this was the end of the world, and I could never come to an agreement on time to sort this out. Eventually (thanks to my boyfriend's dedication and persuasion) they deducted the amount to € 200 which I paid immediately (thanks again Steemit!). And then there was this other problem that seemed to be the actual reason for the data alert, an amount of € 5500 (or something) and I needed to pay them € 1000 and monthly € 100, then they'd remove my data from the system and give me my passport. I really felt like my basic human rights were taken during these months, I also wrote some posts about that lol (that's what I do, write posts about everything). I had enough savings from Steemit left to pay them € 750, so we proposed them to lower the amount to € 750 and agreed with a monthly payment of €100 and they agreed. After this, I felt so relieved and light as a feather after feeling so down and not seeing the end of the tunnel during these months. We overcame a huge thing, again. Like we did the past years.

The feeling of being a Whale on Steemit

I got to be whale for a day thanks to @anomadsoul! This was such a cool experience, but let me tell you that it was quite exhausting too. I was constantly thinking about how high his voting power was, and was this post worthy to get a higher vote yes or no.. I wanted to make Eric proud, not mad ;-) Basically it came down to the fact that I was working my ass of for 1,5 day in a row with little sleep, and the hours that I did sleep I believe I was still thinking about my voting behaviour with Eric's vote behind it. It was cool, thank you for this experience Eric!

We went on holiday 4 times this year

Now let me explain, these were all short trips of 3 days spread between July and December, but still.. I find it nice to say after all these years of struggling that we have settled down here, paying our bills every month and bought furniture for the apartment and after that, we still managed to go on 4 trips. Two of them were to Lake Balaton by train, but the other two were to other countries. We went to Skopje, Macedonia and to st.Pauls Bay in Malta. Although I would have loved to stay longer during all these short trips, I noticed that these short breaks really made sure we could reload and continue our work again afterwards. Except for the most recent one to Malta, coming home made me feel even more depressed because of the weather. Malta was 19 degrees and I loved it, in the future, I really want to live somewhere with a winter temperature like that. I would recommend all of these trips by the way! Skopje is so nice and cheap, where Malta is beautiful but more expensive. Balaton is so nice to spend time during summer, and I can't wait to go there again this summer, but this time (now we know where we like it) we will stay a week instead of three days. Is summer here already?

All these great communities and people I met

I can't emphasize enough that I really really appreciate all these people I have a connection with and met during my time on Steemit. I've been welcomed in several communities by now and even asked to participate and become an active community member in several communities too, which is quite an honour. Although some challenges I would have loved to do, it wasn't always the right timing, but I do appreciate the fact that I was asked for the "job". One of the most warming (and funny) communities that brought me so much more than just a laugh, is @comedyopenmic.

At a certain point I got asked to be a judge, and so I did that quite some rounds. You'd think these community members can't be serious when you looked at their profile image (Trump with a clowns nose) but let me tell you that a lot of the guys in the community are really smart and know what they're talking about. They have a good pair of brains combined with a huge dose of humour. Not only are they funny and give great advice, maybe the most important thing about this community is the community aspect. When one of us needs support somewhere, they rise and shine one by one to back us up. So not only have they lead me to tears numerous times since I became part of the community but also have they brought me great support and advice about all kinds of things. I know you guys know that I'm talking about you, so no need to tag you all individually, thanks for being there and let's make an even better community next year!

Curation and finding my inner artist back

I found my love for curation, thanks to many different communities I learned that this is something I really love doing. It even made me focus on curation more than writing for several months. I found back the inner artist in me, that had been asleep for a while again, and now I write about it I'm thinking "damn, I still have unfinished artworks too". This is one of them:

Translating

Although I've wanted to do translating job in the past before, I never actually did it. When @misslasvegas told the Dutch people in our discord server about a new application window at Davinci/Utopian for Dutch translators, I didn't hesitate any longer and made my application post. And I'm glad I did, I got "hired" and am part of the Dutch translation team. It turns out that I really enjoy translating, and although I haven't been focussed enough the past weeks (after working my ass off the weeks before that lol) to translate, I know that this is something that I will probably keep doing for a long time from now. It's another passion found thanks to (again) Steemit!

Reaching reputation 60

This was something I was looking forward to for a while, seeing my reputation grow to the magic number 60. Don't know why but this felt like a big deal at the time. When it finally hit 60 I was so happy, it felt like I finally became part of this group of people that had some kind of status. With that I actually mean that probably more higher rep people will read your posts now when seeing you have a high reputation too. Of course this is not always the case, but it felt like this in the beginning. At this moment I don't even know what my rep is to be honest, because I don't really care and just do my thing anyway.

As the deadline is in 19 minutes I have to wrap it up here, and maybe I forgot some things that were worth mentioning, I need to get the post out there on time. So sorry that I didn't flourish it up with more pictures, you can find them on my profile if you want to read more about the things mentioned above. I just didn't have enough time to add more here, sorry! Overall Steemit has broadened my horizon A LOT and it has brought me many many great things and made my life a lot easier financially. Even though prices are this low at the moment, I have faith that this will be better in a while, and I will not leave the platform because of it. Thanks to everyone that has been supportive and to all of you that I've connected with! Let's continue doing so, cheers!