While I've yet to see any huge tangible impact that I've made to the steemit community, I like to think that my presence here is noticed and appreciated. I feel that I've made a bunch of friends here and I hope to help as many people as I can, both by sharing ideas and inspiration and by coming up with tangible solutions to problems, from how we could communicate better, to how we can ensure a more fair distribution of wealth and resources, both on and off steemit.

Recently, the huge balancing act that I always play has been a bit overwhelming and so I wanted to share both the things that I've been busy with and some discouraging elements that have slowed down my progress.

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The slow but inevitable evolution of "Optimism at the End of the World"

When I work on an Optimism post, it takes a lot out of me. They usually take about two hours to write and sometimes another two to rewrite, sometimes forking off into two or three topics which I have to write separately and then rewrite. Sometimes in the middle of writing one I realize I need to talk about something else first and so I can't release it right away. It's not just about time either, I try only write these posts from a place of inspiration, so when I get busy, it's hard to churn these out every few days and if I feel down, I need to wait until I feel full of energy again. So, sorry @stellabelle, I know you advised me to write twice a day, but for me writing twice a day means posting every other day, as I'm still not able to create stream of consciousness posts that I find consistently inspiring.

There's is also the issue of how to present the ideas and how to move forward in a way that makes sense. Since I've started I've had the intention of going in a more "spiritual" direction, to answer questions like "what the hell are we doing here?". But first I've needed to lay the groundwork so that these ideas make sense to people who haven't neccesarily been exposed to them and emphasize some really important ideas (specifically building up an awareness of framing and developing an empowered but balanced internal locus of control).

I am also searching for a way to express these ideas the way that I experience them, as both personal truth, but also flexible and malleable, without conforming too much to typical New Age vocabulary. Words don't only have specific meanings, they also carry connotation based on how the words are commonly used and who uses them. The way certain words are overused by people who don't fully understand them means that you run a risk of being lumped together with those people when you do use he same set of vocabulary.

Words like "resonance" and "frequency" do help me to express certain concepts but it's important that I first establish that the ideas I'm sharing come from my own personal experience, not from conjuncture, blind faith or the reprocessing of ideas from others, though there are a few thinkers and teachers who have helped me clarify my own experiences so I am able to better express them in words.

So since I am nearing this turning point for the series, a lot of thought has gone into how to best move forward.

Looking for creative ways to bring my fiction over to steemit.

Some of you have noticed I have a patreon account that I link in almost all my posts. If you haven't, I'd love it if you checked out my stories over there. I came here with the main purpose of sharing these stories. I only later discovered that steemit would be a good place for me to start sharing essays that I had been thinking about writing for a while. I've avoided posting my short stories because I can't bear to watch them fade into obscurity by the 7 day life span of posts here, and the rate at which new material piles on top of old material.

Recently I have been thinking about using steemit to promote my patreon while at the same time using it as a more interactive forum to discuss the ideas presented in the stories. I could give some behind the scenes info about how the stories were born, take Q&A if there were people interested enough to ask questions, and collect similar experiences from other steemit users. I would like my stories to invite collaboration but I'm still searching for ways to go about this, so please share your ideas

@vangelov has just started a writers guild, information can be found here . I plan on getting really involved and I hope that this will help many of us who are passionate about their writing to integrate our work at steemit with certain work that translates better to other platforms.

Working on a new project - the Dead Post Initiative

A few weeks ago I had an idea for an initiative but felt stumped about how to implement it. While I'm not entirely against contests, I want organic support for good material to be widespread and I feel contests can also drain a lot of attention away from more organically inspired material. I also think we have enough competition in the world and that judgement of what's better and what's worse is pretty arbitrary. So for these reasons I've avoided doing contests even though I know they can generate a lot of interest and payout and can also be fun (I recently entered two myself, one by @eco-alex and one by @hannahlicious).

BUT as with many other things in my life recently (more info below), I've had to make compromises because I still want to connect with people who are living within the norms of society despite my desire to live outside of them and so at times I need to go outside of my comfort zone and do something a little more normal. So it will be a contest and I'm posting details about it tonight. I hope it can help us greater appreciate some of our fellow steemians work and I hope it'll be fun. Please check it out.

Language related projects

My OK Spanish project has turned into less of a full initiative and more of a study blog where I document my progress. I still give a lot of advice about how to study language effectively. I've also thought of some projects to engage with the Japanese community since I speak (or spoke) fluently and they can be a tricky bunch to really go deep with (of course this is just a generalization, my best friends are all crazy f*ckers). With the full time job and all else that I'm working on, the language related stuff is currently at the bottom of my priorities, but the Japanese project will certainly become a focus when I move back.

Recording music

I've been working on some song for the past few years and have been relying on friends to help record. Some have offered to help free of charge but I found that there are some things that were difficult to express and that without some basic skills with recording software, I wouldn't be able to make it sound like I wanted. So I've dedicated myself to learning how to use some recording software. I've had a problem installing The copy of Cubase that my friend gave me so I'm eyeing Ableton, which I wanted to work with from the beginning. My music has been described as folk because I play acoustic guitar but I'm ready to evolve beyond that label through knowledge of effects and being able to record other instruments and sounds.

Work

While I know that if I used every trick in the book and focus on strategizing, I could probably turn steemit into a full time job, I'm trying to stay consistent with my values and do only what I'm comfortable with as and sometimes the results are underwhelming because, let's face it, people like pictures and videos more than they like writing. They like to have a face and a name and I'm still just a pineapple head. They like things to be presentable and my attitude to that is basically "meh". So sometimes I give myself a little extra work by insisting on doing things my way. I'm still a ways off from making writing, music, and community building my full time work without having to compromise too much, so I've had to go back to working, including some stuff I would not to choose to do if I could help it. I plan to move back to Japan so I need to start saving money cause I have no savings now and things are expensive there.

I finally understand how hard it is to balance steemit with a regular life. I was able to put 8-10 hours a day into steemit before whereas now I have 2-3 hours tops and as the honeymoon phase is over and I get tired more easily while working, sometimes I take a break for two or three days. The more you upvote me though, the sooner I can get things moving and get closer to my goal of just doing what I do.

Less engagement from friends on steemit

My motivation to spend my free time on steemit (as I said, I have much less time than before) is reduced dramatically by the amount of comments I've received recently. I can't blame old friends and readers to have forgotten me when the whole format of steemit encourages us to constantly look for new people to connect with, but it's a little disconcerting when my posts get only 3 comments or less, especially when they got so many before. Even when they get a decent payout from one or two bigger fish, I still feel unmotivated when there's no engagement. I'm sorry that I haven't been able to provide the same level of engagement on others posts and I can't really blame anyone for missing mine, but it certainly hurts my motivation to write.

One huge hit to my motivation has been the lack of engagement on he Be Awesome chat. If you want to cheer me up, come make friends with my friends in our chat room which was designed as a place to make deeper connections on steemit and let community form organically without too much talk of crypto or steemit strategy. Link in my signature.

Being forced to reconsider my approach

Aside from being pushed back into normal work, there are many other compromises I've had to make regarding my approach to sharing what I have to share with this world. Some make me feel like I have the opportunity to grow like not relying on someone else to record my music. Some are not pleasant but not so bad, like holding a contest. Others make me uncomfortable. Dealing with "potential customers" drains me, for one. One in particular has really been bothering me. We opened a tiny studio/community space last year with the very small amount of money that we had. We offered drinks and held small events, pay-what-you-want. People didn't seem to understand this and it made them feel awkward, so we've reconsidered turning it into a regular bar/cafe for the last 3 months we are allowed to rent the place in order to make back some of the money we lost. The idea of a bar itself isn't so bad, but the process....We've found ourselves forced to "network" with others and I don't like having my own personal benefit in the front of my mind when I'm interacting with others, even when everyone else is doing it. I don't like advertising. I don't like dealing with people who have their own personal benefit in mind when talking with "friends". It sometimes drains me for two or three days at a time and makes it harder to write from a place of inspiration but as the space was under appreciated and we are strapped for cash and trying to save, it feels like a better choice then just letting it go to waste for 3 months.

Conclusion

All I can do is keep trying my best. I know I have wonderful ideas to offer this world but how to go about finding the people whom the ideas were meant to inspire, and how to go about presenting them in a way that makes sense to them is something I've been struggling with for a while. Staying motivated despite countless failures has also been a struggle.

But I'm still here. And if you've read this far, so are you and I thank you for that.

What have you been working on recently?

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thetree - Confessions of the Damaged (my fiction) @ patreon