Day 4 on Steemit

Today marks the 4th day that I've been on Steemit. It's actually the 4th day that I've been researching cryptocurrencies in general. Which makes it pretty remarkable, because I've learned about 5000 new words as well as concepts. I'm studying candlestick charts and triangles, I learned what MACD is, I'm in over fifty Telegram and Discord groups. Most importantly, I'm feeling good about the possibility of being financially independent. It's been a struggle for me and now it feels like I've found hope. Hope that we can circumvent the wage slavery, the status quo, the injustices, the wealth gap.

It began with a stubbornness of seeing if I could understand all this with no knowledge of finances, the stock market, economics, and being exceptionally bad with money. I'm in a lot of debt, mostly from student loans and credit cards, and I'd be the last person you should trust your money with. In fact, I didn't believe in myself so much that I handed over some money to a friend who was into crypto a few years ago. Even when she told me that my $600 capital had turned into $2600, I didn't think to look into it. I merely celebrated and hoped it would continue. I had tried several times before to see if I could stomach learning about crypto, and I failed mostly due to insecurities. Fear that I couldn't understand it created a self-fulfilling prophecy where I never did. You see the same thing when you try to introduce new people to crypto; they simply back away smiling, saying they could never do it.

This year I was determined to understand it. I knew there was some kind of mainstream breaking point coming, and that it may be coming but it's still good to get in now. And after living, breathing, watching, listening, reading, and talking crypto for 4 days, I finally feel like I have arrived at some sort of beginner knowledge base. There's some kind of foundation forming in there. My brain is not useless. Things are starting to make sense. The fog hasn't lifted, but there's some fuzzy outline of shapes in the distance, so at least you know you're not alone.

I guess what has surprised me most is that we aren't alone (I never thought we were alone in the alien sense, as I most definitely believe in extra-terrestrial lifeforms, but I digress). I never thought that in chasing money and simply trying to get a financial foothold that I would find people and community, but that's exactly what happened. There's palpable excitement in every chatroom, every blog post, every Youtube video. There's this feeling that we are all standing in a room together, making history - even when the reality is that we're all sitting in front of our computers, not talking to anyone because we're glued to the screen watching numbers rise and fall, probably ordering food delivery because going out means you miss what's going on.

It just makes me chuckle, knowing that there's many like us all over the world. We are not alone.