It all came crashing down .... in my head.

So I just logged into steemit and realise it has been 20 days(!) since I've posted. omg! It is in fact the longest break I have taken from steemit since I joined more than 2 years ago.

Major Burnout

I want to talk about what's been going on and why I haven't posted in so long after a solid 2.5 years of posting daily to steemit, interacting with the community with comments and curation and now living in more discord servers than I can count on one hand. I guess this isn't a fun post or likely to be well structured as my brain is just all over the place. Focus is my current enemy. I will do my best to keep things organised so you can follow along. You may even find some of these issues familiar. We are all in the same boat after all.

So it comes down to this.. 2 years ago I joined steemit with the gleam of positivity and future riches in my eye. I would see posts by whales like sweetsssj and others that were bringing in hundreds if not thousands of dollars per day. I saw a way to earn a supplemental income that could help improve my quality of life and perhaps provide my partner and I an opportunity to do something more with our lives (like get an actual house).

Don't get me wrong here, I did not for one second think it would be easy or not require some hard work. I had some early successes .. the first week one of my posts blew up and earned me in excess of $200. I never quite achieved that again. But I carried on as it wasn't just about the money, it was about the new friends I was making here as well.

But there is only so much you can do before the 'B' word hits you (burnout). So here's what my last 2 years looked like:
I work 9-5 in and office mon - fri, I go home write a steemit post, cook dinner for my partner and I and respond to comments while doing other things around the house and not ignoring my partner. Thurs/Fri I write my posts in the last hour that I am in the office before I run home, eat, change and go back out for my night job which keeps me out of the house from 7pm until midnight. This wasn't too bad, I was able to sustain that for a while though it left me very little time to myself or even to go out and create new content as a photographer.

In all that time I only did one thing with my earnings... powered it up. I never cashed anything out .. and well.. you can see the state of my wallet now. Not much to show for 2 years of work.

So I started looking at additional opportunities like whaleshares and weku. I sign up to those and start posting there too.. I've just tripled my workload.. but I am doing it.. what's the payout? where am I getting with any of these? Nowhere. Fast.

Intermission
I just want to interrupt here as I feel like I am turning into a whiny bitch at this point. Like all I care about is the money. Well that isn't quite the case, but lets be real, we all came here initially because you could get paid for your content.
End Intermission

Ok back to our regularly scheduled programming.....

Where was I? Oh right.. whaleshares and weku. They all have their own fair share of problems right now though its all mostly political infighting in the controlling communities.. they've become a bit toxic in that sense, though many many great bloggers are still on those platforms running some really great communities. I joined those as based on steemit history, getting in early is the best way to get ahead quickly and get into a position of success.

Well, it didn't last long and although I made some good headway in the beginning, all that extra work engaging with the communities in each started taking up more and more time.. and time is finite.

This just led to me being exhausted, losing the energy to be creative or think of new content to create started to become a bigger and bigger task until it because overwhelmingly daunting. Case in point, I have been writing this post for 3 days now.

^{I wrote this post with zero pictures in mind, but this one kinda sums up my life recently...}

Glutton for Punishment

I could see the meltdown coming.. it was only a matter of time.. so what did I do? I joined another(!) platform, that had only been up for a few weeks. I thought this would be great, a platform only just starting. It had 6 witnesses so I became a witness as well because it would help me grow my own stake much quicker as well as being a more central part of the community.

You may have heard of this platform and possibly flinched when you hear who is running it. Bilal Haider is not a well thought of character in the steemit community and with good reason. I was warned and warned about him and despite this I moved forward, though I did so with caution. My rationale being that he wouldn't possibly scam or hurt his own platform. It would be against his own best interests. Well, its created and interesting dynamic as he started the platform with great intentions, even providing a public account anyone could anonymously post with so opinions could be stated with out fear of reprisals like flagging. Well it didn't last very long. As soon as some of the witnesses disagreed with his direction or started asking hard questions he would get defensive and shut the conversation down. He'd go so far as to delete comments in discord to change the narrative of the conversations. I have steered clear of the drama as I want no part in it. But it all came to a head where several of the top witnesses were blacklisted to the point that they cannot access their accounts anymore. Then he took a huge chunk of the pre-mine and powered up his own accounts in order to rearrange the witnesses to his liking .. dropping those who speak against him or disagree with him out of the top 20.

If someone posts something to inform the community of what's going on, he calls it propaganda and blacklists them. Now if he wants to do that, its his business. After all he created the platform and if he wants to censor people then that's his prerogative. For me that goes against what these blockchain platforms are all about. But if that's what he wants then i'm not going to complain about it.

so while feeling burnout from too many platforms and not enough hours in the day I had to deal with the drama imploding the bearshares community. It got to a point where I just couldn't face opening discord and reading the latest comments, arguments and what not.

Then one day things at my 9-5 went crazy and I spent two weeks working from 9am - 9pm everyday and I just couldn't post.. I thought about reposting old content to fill the hole but I couldn't bring my self to do that either.. I just stared at my screen exhausted.. wondering.. why do I bother?

Changes need to be made

After a few days I though to myself that its probably a good thing to get a break from all this for a few days, but when the chaos at my office subsided and I went back to a normal schedule I struggled to even open up steemit or any of the others, even just to read other people's posts.

Now we are here, 20 days later and I feel like its time to post again (more out of guilt than motivation) so that people know I am not dead, and that I haven't given up on steemit. I do recognise through all this that perhaps a change needs to be made. With that in mind I think I will stop posting to whaleshares and weku. I am keeping my accounts there open, but I am not investing time there for now. The same goes to bearshares, I can probably repost what I put on steemit there.. but my energies must be focussed here. Here I am part of a well established and supportive community and despite steemit's faults (as we all know there are quite a few) it's still one of the best platforms out there.

The daily posting has for the time being become unsustainable to me. Though I feel that regular posting is very important, I don't know what shape my posting schedule will take at this point. For now I will commit to one post per week, which later I will increase. but for now that is what I can handle without a nervous breakdown.

Things are gonna get better

Crypto has been in a bit of a shit position this past year, but it has been holding steady so I feel like things will improve if we all stick it out. That can be challenging but it takes patience.. I need to keep telling myself that things will improve and that I haven't wasted the last 2 years of my life. It kind of helps as a reassurance from the burnout. As much of what comes with that feeling is a sense that I have not achieved anything, and there is no worse feeling (imo) than working hard and not moving forward.

Has anyone else experienced this level of burnout on steemit before? How did you deal with it? Did you find yourself in a better place after? Jeez my brain still feels like pudding in my skull :/

I apologise for the wall of text and absolute lack of images.. its just not been an image kind of post. and for those of you that actually read until the end.. thank you for taking the time. I know this hasn't been a very coherent or well written post, I guess I am still somewhat struggling with the burnout.

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Thanks for Looking.
Follow me and read more of my posts here: @fiftysixnorth