My lower lip is twitching, my eyes hurt because of the salty tears running from it and it is so hard to compose when all you want to do is curl up into a fetal position and cry.

This post touched me in such an emotional level that I am at lost at words. I usually am highly opinionated but this has left me a mess.

Thank you for sharing a piece of your soul in post. It takes a lot of guts to be able to share something like this and I freely receive and hold it dear.

I have to be honest when i was reading this post I felt some chills because in a way your battles were my battles last year. The very words you described your feeling of hopelessness, that weight that you carried aroun, the darkness and the demons you were fighting as all you wanted to do was scream.

That JPEG image made me stop and I just needed to cry. That outpouring of emotions was just too much for me to be able to type what I wanted to say. I didn't want to end my life, I wanted to end the pain and suffering. Low-self esteem, a difficult childhood and repeated failures got me so depressed.

What alcohol was to you, depression was my personal demon. I have lived for more than 2 decades battling those demons in my head. It came to a point that I stopped saying I need help and just started saying I am okay so they can stop bothering me.

I smiled and went through my life until I was 12 and had my first major depression attack. It was so bad that I took my life. I drank acid and vomited it all out. My mind was saying it wanted to die buy my body refused. I got help and lost myself to video games and righting depressing fiction. I called this my Edgar Allan Poe stage as page after page of depressing poetry and stories were churned out. Eventually I reentered society.

At 19 years old my dad died and my whole life crumbled with him. I was very close to my dad. I was his spitting image from the smile, to the build and twinkle in our eyes. He killed himself, drunk so much that his liver burst and I was partly blaming for that because I was so far away. The letters that he sent took too long to be delivered, the few phone calls that he would be able to do were all too brief. He died far away from his family, far away from me, alone and in pain. When he come in a box. I just lost it and after we laid him to rest I refused to go out and became a recluse again, my time filled with video games and writing again.

In a moment of emotional weakness I drank a bottle of pills with the intention to die. Again my body vomited everything out. I was sent to rehab and this is what I call my Alien Abduction episode. Born of the rumor from school that I got abducted by aliens. Whenever I get together with college buddies they still tease me about it. No one knew the real reason because once again I would smile and say I am okay.

2017 was a terrible year for me. I lost my job that I loved, professional and personally destroyed by a boss who wanted all the power to herself and several businesses and investments failed. It was as if everything conspired to be the worst case scenario.
I had set myself then to die a third time. Third time's the charm as they say. I had all of my affairs fixed, my will created, well more like recorded. I even paid for the funeral parlor and my subsequent cremation because I did not want to bother my family.

I was all set and although I was still seeing professional help but it was not working. In a last ditched attempt, she had me start writing again. At first lengthy emails, then she told me to blog again. A sort of cathartic exercise. I was already set to die on December 4 so I gave her one last courtesy. I was too broken to be mended.

I started Steemit last October and wrote mostly disturbing and dark fiction. It suited my mood and in a way I was happy because at least in the block chain my words would be forever there. I would have existed.

November came and I had connected to several individuals who were fighting the same kind of demons. We bonded together like a focus group that never met personally but would talk through our written word.

Maybe because I am more of a writer that I was responding better to written encouragement rather than hearing strangers talk to me about it. Maybe because I was not hearing it from people that didn't understand that would say I can choose to be happy, that suicide was not the answer that whatever it is in my head is just make believe. I learned to tune those people out.

December 4 came, I opened my fridge to take a pitcher of water. I would need a lot. I then took out a box and gingerly set it on top of the table. I kit a solitary candle and smiled as I blew the candle and wished myself to become better.

I did not get the pills next to the box that day. I did not cover my head with my pillow to scream as I am accustomed to doing but rather I opened my PC and began to write in Streemit. I had written a few days ago an article on the amazing adjustments I had because of Steemit.

Steemit has indeed changed my life. The demons are still there whispering at times but they are held at bay by a new found hope that I have. Now I am truly cloaked by the 2nd part of my name I had given myself. INVICTUS To have **My head is bloody, but unbowed. **

A couple day ago I met this amazing young woman who has Stage 5 Renal Failure. She just joined Steemit and was just cruising along without any definite plans when she stumbled to my group. She was chatty enough nothing out of the ordinary at first. A contest I was running on making a 2018 visionboard was almost ending but I was nagging her to join. Reluctantly she did and was one of the last entries but it floored me. I would have given her 1st place if the other entries were not done artistically and also showed so much heart.
I normally don't send people links to look at but I feel that I need to connect her to you! My 2018 Vision Board: Personal Growth, Health Improvement and a Kidney Transplant (fingers crossed)

Then I came across her proper introduceyourself post and I was an absolute total wreck afterwards Hello Steemitverse: A Get To Know Me Post

Here was a woman who desperately want to live and I, on the other hand wanted to die. The stark contrast of what we wanted woke me up.

I am a firm believer that I survived my third attempt to be hope to people. Sounds arrogant and assuming yes but I feel it was fate that I needed to meet this woman and spur her to action, spur her to believe that there will be more than the dialysis, watching movies on her phone and her term of "Furniture mode"

She can be more than these things and all she needed was to believe in herself again. You she because of her condition she could not get any work. With the mounting medical bills and no means to pay she was literally at wits end.Joining Steemit she knows that she will need to work on her articles and she is just amazing when she rights but she doesn't have the audience yet that can appreciate her.

I almost have to laugh when people take the approach that people are lazy and want a "free lunch", therefore they are against it. I guess it is easy to take that approach when one is sitting in a University classroom theorizing the ways of the world. Do you know I never heard of anyone from a third world country coming out against this concept. It is usually us elitists in the West who come up with these beliefs.

I had to smile when you said this because she is not the type of person that would take a free lunch. She would work for it if only given the opportunity.

Just like the hundreds of Filipinos who are active in Steemit right now. All they want is an opportunity to earn and live. Their wants are simple. Provide for their family, buy a house and save some money. Most do not aspire to be CEOs or CFOs of giant corporations. Their focus is on their daily needs. So hearing someone taking advantage of these people. Of a team leader of a certain group is exchanging 1 SBD for the price of 4 dollars just infuriates me because she is taking the hard earned money from people who worked so hard for it and charging almost half for fees. We are working on our own exchange system and we have been able to minimize the fees because we know that each cent that they received will be used for food and utilities. It is not for luxury but to feed their babies.

Give us your poor, broken, uneducated, ugly, overlooked, unsuccessful, hopeless, abused, weird, outcast, lonely, scared, fragile, and desperate....and we will turn them into STEEMIANS.

This was awfully close to the article I was writing before I saw yours. I have already thought of the phrase below.

So I have tasked myself to be a champion to those who are are feeling down and defeated, weighted by the depression and hopelessness that they are feeling, to brush away the darkness and fear and once again give them hope through Steemit.

In Steemit I have found my purpose and with purpose follows wanting to live and see to it that we succeed in making a difference with the gifteconomy of Steemit.

Sorry if I hijacked this comment but indeed this has got to be the best sentiment I have read lately. A good day to you.