Wow. Always good to chat with a fellow American. I left America when I was 20, built a business in Korea and 5 years later retired to investor/ semi retired life. Dropped out of college after two years and avoided student loans all together. It's given me the freedom to travel the world for most of the past 19 years. Even when I was working in Korea I skipped out all over Asia during those years. I have favorite spots, favorite countries and so on.

My first three months on steem were horrific, I almost quit like a dozen times, but I'm stubborn as hell and was determined to figure out how to make money here. After I cracked the code I made more money than I could have imagine especially during the 2017/18 run up. My best month was almost 20k! Here is the secret recipe that you're not suppose to know.....post once a day, consistently, something of decent content, but definitely don't spend all day making an amazing post cause that will most likely not make you any more money and just leave your frustrated (waste of time). Then network, network, network. Get into conversations with people that have Steem power. Make connections with people, like you've done with me ;) Comment on others blog, if they don't start up-voting you after a while go and ask for support to your blog in the most chill way you can thing, nothing to lose at that point. To make things simple, 80% of your time should go to networking 20% creating blog posts. Having good SP this is also a huge ingredient to baking the cake. Then you can up-vote others with similar SP, and they will like that a lot, and often return the favor. So with 10k SP or more you have a huge advantage, but you can still build it with zero SP but it will be much more difficult. That is what I did, so it is possible. Also look into HIVE. That place should be easier to apply this to, steem has too much Korean and Chinese money that will never up-vote us. The downvoters would hate to see me explain this too you, it reveals too much truth. But I'm an honest guy and at this point I've got enough fuck you money where they can go fuck themselves and I could give too shits. pardon my English. But if they read this they will not like it at all, cause you're suppose to be here for your health and nothing more. Stupid.....ughhhh You seem like a good girl with a lot on her shoulders, so I hope this helps. I would just add this, it is true that you can make good life long friends here and I have, people I've met in person traveling and so on. So that certainly has value, but people need to eat.

Enough from me ;) Have a great day!