My "music way back challenge" response & a heart-dump about some of my "feelz" about my first year here.

Hey Again Steemitizens

This one is gonna be a post from the heart, about my feelz lately so if that doesn't interest you, you'll probably want to skip this one, but you can count on this one being pretty real.

First off the catalyst for this post is a call to participate in one of the latest chain-challenge posts going around the platform recently. I was asked by @simgirl to respond to what is called "The Music Way Back Challenge" in her post here.

First let me address the invitation to the challenge from @simgirl...

In the Music Wayback Challenge, I am supposed to post every day for 7 days and cite a song (another option was tv shows) that were influential in my life over time in big ways. I am supposed to describe what the song or show meant to me and why.

Well, my initial reaction was mixed. I said as much in this comment on @simgirl's post that explains how I feel about these sort of things.

So I have decided to compromise and post one song, that I feel like summarizes my life in a way that makes sense, is a favorite of mine right now and has made it's way onto my favorite song list. Please note my discomfort about randomly posting copyrighted music, but I think this is going to turn into a little bit of a post about some stuff going on with me, so a positive, upbeat song might be the place to begin. Why not, right?

The lyrics speak so much to my entire life in general and if anything will make you smile today, this fantastically scenic and happy video will. I almost guarantee it.

The song is "Bibia Be Ya Ya" by Ed Sheeran. My Ghanese friends here on the platform tell me that this phrase roughly translates to "Everything is going to be alright" or more like "Everything will work itself out". Don't worry, the lyrics are all in English except that phrase. ;)

The cinematic original version of this video is filmed entirely in Ghana and in addition to the lyrics kind of summarizing so much about my reality, it also really speaks to me because of my work in Nigeria via our Agents of HOPE and the @YouAreHOPE Foundation I founded here on the steem chain. While Ghana and Nigeria are two very different African countries, I suspect the gorgeous and stunning video visuals and the raw energy of the people shown may be kind of similar from what I have learned here about both places.

I hope you won't just scroll by and skip the video. I hope you give it a listen, especially if you need a little encouragement today, and we could all use a little encouragement in life sometimes, right?

So now let's talk about some stuff this exercise conjured up for me from my heart.

I am approaching my one year anniversary on the platform which will happen on June 12th. I have amassed a reported 3025 followers, and have made 7770 posts. This will be #7771, in just about exactly two weeks shy of a full year spent around here as of today. My rep stands at 63.76, which is largely meaningless now that so many people are just waltzing in and buying themselves a 70. But so it goes.

Folks, I think you all already know I love this place, this platform, these communities and many of you people whom I spend my days with here... many very long, sleepless, neverending days here.

I spend about 20 hours a day online on discord, or on the platform sites, interacting with groups and individuals, and forming what in some cases will be life lasting and life altering bonds with many of you. Sometimes I do 30 hour and even longer runs between naps. Someone always needs my attention here, around the clock, around the world. Non-stop 24/7.

You know I've built or helped build some of the most successful communities on the system. I have spent thousands of hours coaching, counseling, teaching, guiding, and encouraging people, while many of them returned these valuable gifts of time and concern to me as well.

I've personally built or helped contribute to projects that help lift up people and voices, like the two most prevalent 24/7 streaming "radio/television station" platforms on the system and early contributions to help build up or create other peoples communities as well, some of which I still participate in, some of which have gone on without need for my continued assistance or abandoned by me due to divergent changes that occurred after my involvement.

I've made friends, I've made enemies, I've loved and had my heart crushed here in many ways. Platonic, romantic, meaningful and sometimes meaningless.

This place, for a year, despite my full time executive role as a VP of Technology in a non-steem-related software company has consumed me, every second of every day. I literally have dreams about people and situations here when I do manage to sleep in my bed long enough to get some REM cycles, though more often than not I just sleep in my comfortable desk chair, leaned back for an hour or two at a time in indeterminate cycles throughout a week often waking up with my hand still on my mouse an hour later and a million random things opened on my desktop from sleep-time clicking.

Many weeks blur by and I wonder if I have eaten recently, and when did I last pull off the keyboard long enough to take a shower or leave my apartment for something other than a quick dog walk here and there throughout the day.

This is my life

But sometimes life takes a toll on you.

Heartaches, stress, pressure to perform, to be "always on" when I am barely nourished or well slept can be very, very difficult. Add to that some devastating disappointments in certain people here who were not the wizard of Oz but rather an illusion I had placed my faith and hope in, and in one very special, specific case, I fell in love. and it was unrequited and it hurt. a lot, and it still does. a lot.

Two weeks ago, I went to a big meetup in Tennessee. A lot transpired there, but I'm not sure everyone realized how much it affected my "life on the platform" in ways that were no so publically apparent. Sure we all saw the photos of my being a funny drunk after my Hots or Shots episode, so that is no secret, but what may be less apparent is how people perceived me and my intentions and my personality and many have taken me to task for it.

I was held accountable by everyone from nearly zero-day users to a top ten witness for my attitude around here. My "attitude and delivery" were the topic of every conversation I had with anyone whom I care about here for a week solid.

But I'm 49 years old, twice divorced, 35 years in technology, ranging from NASA and hand delivered awards from the president of the united states (Bill Clinton years) to thankless overnights in support roles in my younger days. This is not my first rodeo in multi-million dollar-at-stake environments.

And so I refused to budge on my approach to things, my distaste for certain behaviors of others, even as they held me accountable for my own behavior and I refused to compromise my principles, my integrity, my passion or my conviction to please their personal preferences. I still do... wholeheartedly believe that if someone gets offended by something, a concept I can barely understand, that this is their problem not mine. Seriously, I want to tell these people to get over themselves and grow a pair maybe? If their skin is so thin that they can't take a heated conversation without a need to ignore the delivery and be accountable to the message delivered, well, I cannot help that or them. That's their problem. I stand by that.

So what point am I getting at?

I want you all to know what is really going on with me. I feel like I am a representative for many of you, in our shared communities, as a witness, as a more visible and prominent and highly engaged platform participant and as a partner in projects with many of you.

I do the things. I delegate more than I keep, to projects that support things like the Welcome Wagon, the Turkish Communities, Venezuela, Indonesia, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Philippines and Puerto Rico, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, all have felt my support, The Veterans Communities, The forgotten middle class minnows and low end dolphins who have outgrown all the "minnow support" efforts that abound here, but don't have the "whale legs" of their own to stand on yet in this crazy pool of fish and some other things. I am just a minnow myself, have a look at my wallet, but be sure to add up what I've given away over the year too.

I've built a worldwide charity here, and it's done AMAZING things for thousands of desperate people with all of our generous steem community benefactors and the Agents of HOPE, steemians on the ground in the worlds most desperate economies, helping the most desperate and needful, like the orphans and and infirmed at the bottom of the food chain, even within those more generally economically stressed locales where no one is doing great, where even in the most unimaginably tragic circumstances we have been able to make a difference for thousands of people around the world, together, here, with love and generosity found so rarely in life but abundant on this system by comparison to other environments I frequent.

I am committed to these things, to those who hold me accountable for finishing the things I start. Most of all to myself, because I have failed at so many things in life or left them uncompleted in frustration and exhaustion.

I am here now to tell you I'm hitting that wall again.

I want to quit all the time. I look at my discord inboxes and just want to throw the laptop out the window with the phone still tethered to it by USB.

I am going through the motions, faking it till I make it, to stay enthusiastic and give my best, even when I see the futility of some of my efforts due to bridges I have burned now creating uncrossable barriers, and seeing people exasperated on my doorstep by the pressures of this place themselves, expecting me to have some panacea or advice to make it all better for them, and inside just wanting to tell them, you suck and wont make it, or this place sucks, you don't. but you wont make it, or welp, over and over again issuing the same advice to join communities, make friends, keep going, improve your "product" to be world class to compete here, and on and on, and secretly, not so sure that it's even valid advice anymore.

So yeah, I can't just quit. I have a charity in progress, a 24/7 streaming network to run, commitment to my witness partner @rhondak not to abandon her to this effort. I am in fact, somewhat imprisoned here by my own locks built by own hands.

And that's not a good place to be.

You can't change your location to avoid your problems though. I can't just run off to EOS and start over. I'd just end up in the same place. I can't just abandon the commitments I have here to people I love and cherish, because in my personal life, I actually don't HAVE any other people. I live in a city I moved to for work 8 months ago. I know one person's name in this city, my business partner here, and I rarely see him, we have lunch about once a month for an hour. Granted I've known him since second grade, but we weren't close for 30 years and reconvened our friendship about a year ago when he needed my expertise for his business startup idea. We're a year+ into that by the way, and its going very well, but its a boring enterprise product that I am totally NOT at all excited by, it's just a job I know how to do that permits me to work at home and own my freedom a little. Which I in turn burn up endlessly around here.

I don't like where I live regionally, I didn't choose it, it was just necessary to be here. I don't have personal relationships with anyone within hundreds of miles. My parents are deceased, my daughter is grown up and lives in another state and we rarely can find time to get together once or twice a year at best for a day or so. I am alone out here, except for you all. I could go back to my 1000 lifelong friends and extended family at facebook I guess, but i hate it there. I get angry the second I load the feed and its either pedantic bullshit, political stuff that makes my blood boil or sports which i dont give a rats ass about. There is little for me there, but old connections and distant family that all is nice and everything, but not all that substantial when it comes down to it.

So, what do?

First of all let me stress I am not "depressed" in the clinical sense. Most of the time, I'm in pretty good spirits about things given all the tragedies and loss and loneliness in my life. I adapt, improvise and overcome whatever gets in my way most of the time, but its a constant struggle to do so, without any support at all to speak of in any tangible ways.

Last fall I had a huge falling out with a group here I truly believed was the "family" I am missing in my real life.

I lost a lot when I left that group at first by personal choice to make a statement and take a stand, and then in the angry aftermath got myself (quite wrongly and unfairly by someone later banned themselves for all the reasons I cited at first) barred from ever returning there.

My anger was legitimate, I was wronged, stabbed in the back while trying to HELP the place out and offer it's young and unseasoned leader some solid and battle worn wisdom and the reasons I gave for it later proved to be 100% accurate, but the damage was done. I still hold the main players in that scenario in contempt for many reasons, and those reasons have not changed. No demonstrable change occurred in their behavior or position after I was proven right about my convictions when I left and at least one of those people continues their illusion of wholesomeness to the masses to much success while I struggle along actually doing things myself and putting my money where my mouth is. Sure that pisses me off. Why should a pretender who rarely shows up or even phone it in get lauded while so many of us out here are doing the work nearly 24 hours a day and go unheard, unseen, unsupported even as we work to build supports for the people who go on unaware of these efforts because we don't kiss ass, or use other people to build us up at their expense.

I guess that's the proof that anger, no matter how righteous is an acid that only eats a person from the inside out. And maybe I should pretend more and use others more, like that person does, to bolster my status and position by pretending to be a wonderful person while basically relying on using people and everybody else to make me look good and feel important.

But that's not me, I gotta do things MYSELF, and prove my worth, and I do, but time and time again, the real nice guys finish last and end up angry about it in life. Hell, how many books and movies are written, art that mimics life, about this kind of thing, only in the movies their is always a happy ending for the underdog. In reality, underdogs get lost down at the pound while the fakes, and the insipid often take the day. No wonder so many real-life, non-movie underdogs end up losing it and going berserk in some form or fashion, or just withdrawing, and never even trying anymore. Angry and hurt. A vicious cycle.

All because anger, such as it is, comes from that hurting. And this place has hurt me WAY more than it has ever helped me. That's the nature of giving I think. It costs you. In many ways. The feel-goods that come back from being a giver are of value but are sometimes overcome by the costs. The toll it takes to be continuously held to that standard and try to live up to what you claimed you are and try to be.

I want to quit.

Now I know that if I stopped right here. A flurry of encouraging comments would land below. I have seen them on other steemicide posts and I have added my own encouragements to the pile on such posts more than once.

But that's not what I am looking for here. I don't need to be "encouraged" per se, or placated or applauded. What I need is to be understood. Heard and felt. And for now I am not even capable of quitting. I can't imagine where I would go now or what I would do with my time. A year spent here in days, and virtually many years, by hours spent awake and fully applied here.

Love me or hate me, I'm here. I'm busting my ass, and busting things hurts sometimes. And when we hurt we cry out. And sometimes there is nothing anyone can say or do to help. Especially if the condition has been building up for a long time and isn't just a momentary lapse of reason. (with apologies to Pink Floyd for co-opting that phrase)

Just understand that I am not always a gentle person, and maybe that is NOT when I need your advice, I just need you to hear it, and try to be understanding. Perhaps a little sympathetic without trying to kiss my ass about it. And let me be me.

Because if I can't be me, you won't get the results I produce around here at all. You'll just find me even more disgusted and more likely to quit, shut it all down or pass it on to more enthusiastic and capable hands in the team mates already involved in my various efforts here.

Where does that leave me now? Today? In this moment?

Praying that the song I shared above is true. That tomorrow I can "take a bus right into town and spend the afternoon looking around, for the things that i left on the ground."

Sing it with me now.

Tomorrow is a brand new day. Bibia be ya ya.

Be well. I love you, and if I am screaming at you, it's probably because I actually give a shit. Compare that to people who just pander to you and make you feel good for the moment so they can feel good about themselves and gain your "like".

And it's on you to decide which kind of person you would rather know.

I better wrap up on that note. I hate goodbyes and avoid the use of the words, preferring to leave people with the simple short "prayer" for them to "Be well." I feel it is more loving and less final than "good bye" or even "see you later."

So.

Be well.

With all my love and conviction,
@SirCork
Team Witness #63 in partnership with @RhondaK
Founder: @YouAreHOPE Foundation
Founder: @SteemStarNetwork
Creator: Steem.Agency
Another lost soul floating around your blockchain.