2,520: A plankton's story

I was actually planning on making a post when I reach a reputation of 50 but things took a turn and I found myself with a reputation of 51 after my last post got curated by @curie, for which I am truly grateful. So for today, I would like to take the time and tell my story here on the platform after 105 days of steeming. Hope you guys enjoy it and I hope it will give some inspiration to my fellow plankton out there.

Part 1: A journey starts with a single step

I would skip the registration part because that will take weeks to finish, jokes aside I officially started using the platform on March 27, 2018 and published my first post the same day. I was really looking forward to using the platform because who doesn't want $ by talking about your hobbies which in my case is anime and games. I though to myself that it is like hitting two birds with one stone, I get to spread words about my hobbies and at the same time earn some $, but I guess most of you could already see the flaw on my way of thinking back there, yes, I was naive, too naive in fact. It is not easy to gather attention let alone get an upvote here and because I let my excitement get the better of me, it hits harder than it should when I realized that obvious fact.

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To be continued . . . on the next paragraph.

Part 2: Exploring possibilities

So after waking up from my delusions I picked myself up and decided to explore the areas I am interested in, namely: anime, games and memes.

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The anime community, to put simply, is small, which is evidenced by the amount of pending payout of trending posts that just dulls in comparison to other sections within the platform. This actually spawned two conflicting thoughts on my mind. First is to abandon ship and find something with a larger audience and the other one is to take this challenge, make a name for myself and be one of the pioneers under this category. As for the path that I took, you will learn soon enough.

Next destination is the gaming community and boy this one is booming or so I thought, but at a closer inspection majority of the games posted are games I know but don't play. But I din't give in yet and tried to find if articles about the games I play exists and fortunately they do but the attention it got is almost close to zero. So I decided to check out one final destination - memes.

I finally found a place where I can showcase my skill (if it counts a skill anyway) is what I thought that time and I found many opportunities under this category. There's the memechallenge hosted by fibra59 and it was actually where I acquired my first $ here by placing second in one of the challenges. That accomplishment boosted my confidence which pushed me into creating more memes that started the next phase of my stay here.

Part 3: The easy road

After my small victory at the memechallenge and my weariness of making long posts that doesn't even get a single cent, I gave in to the temptation and took the easy way of earning by making memes.

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Making a meme that only takes a few minutes and has a higher chance of getting an upvote vs. writing an article that takes me hours and most of the time ended up with no upvote at all, the choice was almost too obvious for the past me that was getting anxious by the day.

I made my first meme in dmania on April 11, 2018 and continued to publish there until things happen here and there that lead to temporary closure of the site leaving me and my created memes with nowhere to go. Fortunately, another meme site was just created and that is memeit.

I wouldn't call it a stretch if I say that most of my account's value came from memeit. I am truly grateful to the people behind it. I spent nearly 2 months making memes there but along the way, I feel like something is amiss despite my almost guaranteed payout most of the time.

Part 4. Halt

I found my self on a crisis wherein I am questioning the things that I have been doing all this time. Should I continue making memes or should I reconsider and start making articles again? It was not an easy call to make but I scrolled down and all I saw is a list of memes with $ sign beside them, but they are empty, no interactions of any kind. Then I realized that I was just looking at what's in front of me, I failed to take a step back and see the bigger picture. I was only trying to earn short term profit, you could say that greed got the better of me but at least I learned something from this experience.

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Part 5. Back on track

Having regained my purpose, I set out once again to do what I really should be doing here and that is talking about my hobby, anime (and maybe I will make articles about games in the future). The first few posts I made after that suffered the same fate as the ones I made when I was just starting, but I have resolved my self to take this path regardless of the outcome.

I continued making articles and a week passed by with no apparent progress at sight. I would be lying if I would say that it doesn't fazed me but I kept at it and finally one of my articles got curated by @c-squared community. That incident boosted my confidence to an all time high of 19,783.06 and got me fired up to make new contents. And then bam! 3 days later my latest article got curated by @curie community making it my biggest hit article to date.

Part 6: Epilogue

My stay in the platform, as you can see, has been a wild ride. But it was not a bad one, not in the least. All my blunders, frustrations, achievements has been a good experience that helped me grow not only as a steemian but maybe also a human.

I would also like to take this opportunity to extend my gratitude to the people at @c-squared and @curie community for giving my articles attention. You guys gave me something more than the monetary rewards and that is confidence and fulfillment, because now I know that someone out there takes the time to actually read what I write.

Special thanks to the people that replies to my comments and posts @grarkada, @jlordc, @emergehealthier especially to @steemitboard who has been there since day 1 (lol).

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