First I wanted to say this was a great idea! Not only is it fun to tell "how we got onto Steemit stories," it also gives some good insight into the person behind the username. I think we often forget that while we individually remember what all we've posted, most if not all other users haven't seen the whole series of posts.

Anyway...on with the story:

I was introduced to Steemit by @winstonwolfe early this last July seeing the HUGE post and comment payouts that were going on at the time. After asking tons of questions to get over the "too good to be true" perception, I decided to sign up around the 15th of that month. Even though I'd had social media accounts, I was rarely if ever active on them...but the idea of earning some money through writing was intriguing. I had not written anything for at least 10 years, preferring conversational learning in deeper conversations with people in real life (versus online.)

I went to sign up and guess what? There had just been an issue (that I don't remember enough details of to get into) which prevented any new signups for a while. I tried to signup every day for a week until things were all fixed and I got to make this account on July 22nd. Yay!!

I started off making a couple of "nothing" posts so I could get used to how things worked on here. Then I got to begin discussing some of the 'utopia' ideas that I had worked on for a while, looking for some feedback and ideas. A few people happened to pick up on this, being UBER excited to be having any kind of payout after starting with a string of zeroes since I had no idea of how to market myself or connect with others yet. I was at the mercy of the feed...there wasn't really even a follow function/feed at the time. (At best it showed on the feed in steemstats.)

Anyway, I finally had my 'break out' moment with my introduceyourself post called My Transgender Journey. Even though this wasn't the thousands that others made, I was beyond ecstatic about this. In fact most of my higher paying posts back there were on transgender issues or concepts.

Without drawing this out too much, I've never been a huge earner making it to the trending page on rare occasions...which really was just fine. I was having fun...my writing/content creation bug had been sparked and hasn't stopped.

I ended up starting what is not @steemittalk podcast with @winstonwolfe and launching the Steemprentice Mentor Group. There's of course a ton more that I could bore people with, but there are the main items of my story and why I'm still here.

I truly hope to see this community succeed in figuring out how to tweak the system, economics and other issues so the world can be potentially be shown a better, sustainable option.