I woke up today, Friday the 13th, and went through my whole morning ritual. I started the day by stating aloud, as I lay in my bed, everything that I am grateful for. I find that starting your day out with an attitude of gratitude really helps to set the tone/mood for the rest of your day. Even when things go wrong over the course of the day, I've found that I always return to my happy state, and I attribute that to starting the day with a positive attitude and remembering everything there is to be grateful and happy about.
Anyway, after expressing gratitude, I made my bed, did my morning yoga routine, and then hopped onto Steemit to write a post for my blog, Friendship In a New Age. While I was writing my blog, I received my first pleasant surprise of the day in the form of my best friend hitting me up to tell me that he was on his way to swing by and hang out for a bit because he had just gotten off of work. I was excited to get to hang out with him even for just half an hour or so because it had been a while since we had last hung out.
When he got to my place, we chilled out in my room for a while and talked about life and about his new job that had him working nights, and I told him all about Steemit and how excited I am to be on this site and pursuing my writing passions by creating content every day. We got around to talking about the money aspect of Steemit and I mentioned that right now I'm not even worried about the numbers, I'm just glad to finally find a platform where I can share my art with people who will actually engage with it and offer feedback, which will help me further improve my skills and abilities as a writer.
Eventually he had to head home to get some sleep, and I had to finish writing my post so that I could get ready for work. I made my post, shared it on my other networks and chat rooms, and headed to work. Work was already showing signs of it being a bad day when I got there, because my boss had to leave to go get some stuff that we had run out of, leaving me on my own to open the store for a couple of hours. Anyway, the day progressed slowly, and then out of nowhere we got slammed with customers from all angles and we even ran out of bread, so people had to wait forever for their sandwiches to be made, which put a lot of stress on all of us working.
The day proceeded to get worse, as I had this sudden unexplainable anxiety attack and I started to hyperventilate and get dizzy. My boss noticed my conundrum and told me to go sit down for a while, so I did. Then I started feeling sick, like puke sick, so I ran to take care of business, thinking that the day couldn't possibly get any worse. After my puke episode, I tried to focus on how I was determined to make this day a good day in spite of it being the notoriously unlucky Friday the 13th.
Eventually my shift at work ended and I got to go home. That was when my day took a turn for the better and the disaster that was work faded from my mind. As soon as I got home, I hopped onto Steemit to make another post. I was planning on writing another short story, perhaps even a continuation of the one I wrote yesterday. Of course, instead, I'm making this post that you're reading right now, because what happened next is something I can only describe as an unexpected miracle.
Upon checking my profile, my eyes immediately zoomed in to a number that completely blew my mind. On my story post, the one I wrote yesterday, I saw $62.79 next to the upvote icon! Next to that, I saw that it had received 78 upvotes! I couldn't believe my eyes. I had to keep scrolling up and down and refreshing the page, my own digital equivalent of doing a double take, because I thought maybe the system just glitched out and displayed the wrong numbers or something. Eventually, I clicked on the post itself to see if the same numbers would still appear on the actual post, and sure enough, they did! I was still in such disbelief, but I messaged my best friend and told him about it once I finally started to accept the reality of the situation.
He congratulated me and praised me, and we got to talking about how we both thought it was interesting that just a few hours earlier, we had been talking about how the numbers aren't important to me yet. Then for me to come home and see that the very thing I had said I wasn't focusing on too much, had actually just blown up the way it did, it blew both of our minds! Deciding to try to investigate further, to see if I could trace the success of my post to any one particular account, I clicked on the 78 votes dropdown arrow. As soon as the list of account names popped up, it immediately became clear to me why my post had blown up.
Imagine my sheer astonishment upon seeing that the first name on that list was none other than the famous @curie! Admittedly, I had not really looked into Curie since joining Steemit, however, I had been hearing enough writers on here mentioning it often enough that I put two and two together and realized that it was an account with a lot of weight that a lot of new writers aspire to get noticed by.
I hopped onto the @minnowsupport discord and elatedly announced this first huge victory, since my participation in the Minnow Support Project is what I consider one of the biggest motivational forces for me right now. The people on there are so helpful and supportive and have such interesting and entertaining personalities in the chat room, that I am constantly motivated to keep following my passions and keep making more quality content to post on here. If you're new to Steemit, I highly recommend you go check them out sometime!
I know that this was probably just a random stroke of luck, and it's not likely to happen again often, or even anytime soon, and I'm ok with that. In fact, I see this as just a huge motivating push forward for me. For me to get noticed by Curie this early on, gives me hope that as long as I continue to pursue my passions and write my heart out on here, someday it will truly pay off and people will notice my writing. I'm going to keep on staying focused on that main objective, which is not to make money, but to get my creative works out there and keep my creative juices flowing. If people notice it, then great! But if not, I will remain happy knowing that I put my heart and soul into my work and I love what I create, and that's good enough for me.
I didn't expect this post to end up being this long, but as my fellow writers must know, once we get into the zone with our writing, it just keeps on going and going :P I want to end this post by saying THANK YOU SO MUCH to whoever the mysterious person was who upvoted my post through Curie or otherwise brought it to the attention of the folks who run Curie. I want to thank @stevenalexander as well for introducing me to this amazing platform, which has served as such a great outlet for my creativity since I joined it. Keep on Steemin on, everyone!