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Hey again Steemitizens,

Remember me?

It's been 17 days since my last post, which was a piece of music I made and put on Dsound.audio

Before that I hadn't posted in 16 days.

I used to post pretty much daily. Or every other day...

I am SirCork, a steem addict, and this is my story...

For a guy who used to post daily, averaging less than twice a month all of a sudden, has definitely lead to a lot of inboxed "are you alright?"messages. I suppose I should make a more wide reaching update then, as a result of the concerns I've heard in the background.

First of all, yes, I am fine, physically. As much as ever for a heavy smoker with emphysema who will be turning 50 in a couple months.

Mentally, I am probably better than ever, to be honest, but I wasn't there for a minute, and that's what this is about.

If you followed along with me over the past 14 months on steem, you know I got heavily involved into it from basically my first few days on the platform. I got massively involved into helping launch what is now PAL/MSP and it's massive infrastructure, I built and launched MSP waves and during that time I started sleeping less and less and less, eating precariously at best, in terms of health and spent the following months, so invested into PAL, and the people, eventually having disagreements with poseurs and fakes and leaving PAL, super stressed, super hurt and super sad. Definitely definable as multiple stab wounds in the back. By people I called "family" by then. Fuckers.

As so many of my closest friends here know, I also fell very much in love with someone during that period of time. It looked so rosy at first, my hopes higher than they'd ever been in my life (all 5 decades of it) that I'd met "the one" - the most amazingly gorgeous, talented, smart, funny, articulate, talented woman I'd ever seen. Things seemed to be sparking and for a while, my days were filled with nothing but her. Sadly they still kinda are, but not in a way I am fond of at all.

Because with all the stress and shit in my life from every other angle, I shot the civilians standing between me and my enemies and she was right there in the crossfire. Sadly, standing on their side of the line, repeatedly. The heartbreak, of unrequited feelings, and the loss of all my friends at once, had me ready to quit this place in October and in the mess, my external non-steem life fell apart too.

I let everything go. I walked away from a mortgage and my beloved 17 acres of mountain top off grid heaven, and moved back to a boring featureless average sized city to be closer to my business partner and our growing startup company and figured, well, so much for all my dreams, ill just go to work, and make some money for my kid to inherit and ride my life out. I was REALLY dejected.

After leaving PAL, I sent Im quitting messages to a bunch of people, including my closest friends here and "the one" and all of them encouraged me to find some way to make peace with others and myself and stick around. Because this place is an addiction, it didn't take much for them to talk me into it.

Truth be told, I actually really didn't have anywhere else to go anyway. I don't have any local offline friends in this new city, and people I know all over the world, are just that, everywhere but here. I get really lonely, and all I have is fucking discord and you foolish folks most days. And that is how I stay remotely near sanity's postal code.

So, since I had become a witness while in PAL at their suggestion and somewhat to @Aggroed's insistence it was necessary to progress and they (PAL) needed us to witness up more people and on and on, and okay, maybe to impress the ladies... the one lady... I became a witness.

Since I had become a witness, in PAL, and wasn't in PAL anymore, I needed a "project" and so I launched a new streaming network called "The SteemStar Network" which also attempted to fill up a 24/7/365 streaming show lineup just as I had done with MSP Waves before. Only this time, I didn't build an effective team around me and was on my own.

And I worked, around the clock, literally, across time zones, training hosts, setting up systems and keeping them running, monitoring shows, streams, uptime, all that, basically for what? a few steem here and there on a show announcement post at best. I was spending a fortune on the back end in the meantime in hosting and services and all.

I also realized the charitable things already happening here and there on the platform could be harnessed, organized and made more powerful with a little administration, so I created and launched the @YouAreHOPE Foundation, a steem exclusive, worldwide humanitarian aid organization and proceeded to work with others to rally support, funds and operations for dozens of charitable exercises all over the world, helping, educating, feeding, clothing, shoeing and other services like malaria remediation in villages and such for thousands of needful recipients in the world's most fucked up places.

All of this meant I never slept, like, at all, averaging two hours per 24 many,many days in a row, crashing for 12 on a saturday or whatever, then shuffling through another sleepless,often meal-less set of days till I next crashed.

All of this took a very real and physical and mental toll on me.

I didn't just give of myself till it hurt, I gave of myself, till I was literally waking up on the hard floor next to my desk, uncertain of what day or time it was, and or how I had even ended up on the floor or when.

I thought, well I better get some help on this witness team, and chose to approach a couple of my prominent show hosts on SSN, and because one of those choices proved to be suddenly and unexpectedly unstable more or less, and is now gone, presumably moved to EOS anyway... well, that went badly.

But it wasn't a bad idea to form a team in general and my remaining partner forwarded the idea to include two other people who ARE stable and sane, and we formed the current iteration of our team which is myself, @rhondak, @anarcho-andrei and @gmuxx in no particular order of import or contribution, as we all do all we can all the time together for the platform and its population.

For all this to happen, I had to allow myself to accept that the load, pressure, stress, sleeplessness, bad diet, etc were killing me, literally approaching dangerous levels for my health and basically I was doing all of that while running a very real enterprise scale software firm outside steem (I am a partner and VP of Tech for a SaaS company) where I also deal in international time zones and hours.

It had to stop.

So we formed the new witness team, and I promptly announced the end of the SteemStar Network. I had made it to impress a girl that doesn't love me. I had nearly killed myself doing so, and even then, I loved it as my own child, but I had to kill it. Because even without all the personal reasons, the truth is that dlive basically invalidated the need for it. I assume waves will figure that out pretty soon too, and quit wasting money on it as well, but that's not my problem anymore.

I signed the brand of SSN over to Carrie and Chris who own it now, because they deserve it, and it fits their content needs. I wish them the best of luck with their use of the rather awesome brand. Pretty nice freebie, eh kids? Don't waste it and bum me out even more, kay? thanks :D

So now I mostly just admin @YouAreHOPE, and I've invested time and energy in myself for a couple months. I've been accumulating musical instruments and studio gear with each paycheck and powering down some funds to pay off some debts at the same time, and such. After a year of burning out for others or to win the favor of others, I said fuck this. It's about me now.

I think this all sort of came out of my trip overseas in Feb/Mar. When I got back, I was just not even interested in sharing the trip posts, or photos, and never really did. During that 18 days mostly away from here except some discord chatter, I guess you could say I realized I needed to "peace out" for at least a while.

But I couldn't. The network, the charity, the witness, and hundreds of individuals who message me every day all needed me, depended on me, Ugh.

Once I left 60 of 65 discords with no fanfare, I felt free, I shut down the station, I felt less stress. I started sleeping more. I bought cool musical toys. I found some peace.

I went to the Nashville meetup and shot my episode of hots or shots, frankly, i hope it never airs, I was in a very weird juxtaposition of still being a "celeb" around here, and frankly not giving a flying fuck much anymore about what anyone thought of me or why. They could either put up or shut up, and I didn't see much output coming from my opponents to indicate they were putting out, so they needed to STFU. I still kinda think so, but I am WAY less stressed about it, now that I have checked out for a while, because I've come to realize something.

This place is totally irrelevant. To the world, To me. To pretty much anyone who Is NOT mired down in it's bullshit on a daily basis.

Will STEEM save the world?

I wanted to believe it.

Can it?

Not in its current condition, nor anytime soon. For about a million reasons.

Is it worth me bleeding out to try and help fix those conditions?

I wanted to believe it.

Can I.

Not in my current condition, nor any time soon. For about a million reasons.

Look this ain't a battlefield, the world is NOT at stake.

This is only the 30-somethings most capped crypto on a steeply diving curve and most of the world has never heard of it. We lose sight of it because we allow ourselves to let our brains write the steem commercials in our heads, omg, ill get rich writing blogs on the internet.

Sure, for @malos10 in venezuela, earning a steem a post is LIFE ALTERING, i understand that. I built a charity around the concept. I'm not an idiot.

But...

This system matters to a population of people the size of a small rural US county.

It has the market cap of a modest retail or cafe chain's gross annuals.

I wouldn't TAKE this job, for the amount I earned here last year, if it was listed in the classifieds. Rather, i'd laugh at the ad's workload vs compensation offer. And call the lister an asshole under my breath.

So yeah. Shit had to change.

So now I am on the witness team, @noblewitness, with my wonderfully dedicated, steem loving partners, and I operate the charity as much as it needs, since no one is really donating during the steem depression and when times were good we still struggle for income, but we do miracles for people with what we have managed to scrape up from the best and most awesome minnows who DO support YAH, along the way. Shame the whales don't do much, but I guess that's how they get theirs and let the poor help the poor as usual.

Sure some whales do big things and someone will probably try to that argue below, but hey, you be the judge. A flipping meme site with shitty coding practices that were possibly deceptive easily got a massive delegation but if you put shoes on orphans in venezuela, good luck getting diddly shit. No disrespect to those of you who donate, but most of you are damn near in need yourself, its not the whales saving the world here. Not even close.

Shit like that pisses me off and makes me mad again.

Shit like poseurs pretending to be empire builders while they are nothing but empty vapid frauds using people for their own gain and not ACTUALLY doing anything for ANYBODY also comes to mind on my fuck this place list, and even the people I loved, and called friends, may or may not be what they appear to be.

At first I thought, I've discovered a pool of early adopting geniuses. I've found my people on steem! Then I realized I had merely found people - and they very often still are very very average and basic. Only a FEW actually turned out to have the depth and intellect I craved to have around me. Those of you still on my "buddy list" well, you know who you are cause we're still talking. ;)

So yeah. I checked the fuck out.

I am around, I've never really been gone. I just don't have many nice things to say, so I'm done talking more or less, for now anyway.

Obviously I came here to post this, and it is pretty obvious I cannot just leave now, I have WAY too much time, blood, sweat and genuine tears invested here. But I'm likely to be scarce, and harder to reach. Because my time has to become MY time, again, or I was going to explode and probably die. Literally.

So that's that.

My discord remains running. YAH continues but may be more and more merged into the Alliance in coming days, to be determined as we go and as I see how things go for me.

I'm sure this is one of those times where I'll make the wrong, choice, you'll all get rich and I'll miss yet another boat, but maybe not. I'm tired of regrets. My life is made of them. Paved with them. Some were within my control, like this, others weren't, like the girl. Either way, shit ends in heartache for me. Most of the time. Gonna try to minimize this one's already fairly devastating effects.

Steem really does have promise I guess. But it has a long row to hoe to realize that.

And the girl, well, I'll just keep trying to convince myself that it is insanity to miss what you never had to begin with. No matter how badly you wished for it.

I think what I'm trying to say in all this, for all the reasons and shit above, is that I gotta spend way less time here, but I am too addicted to leave completely. And maybe miss that outside chance this place ever amounts to something relevant on Earth. (jury very out on if it ever will under current management.) is that I'm still in love with the girl. She's still never going to fall in love with me. For a million reasons. And that makes it really. really. really hard to be here.

It also makes it so very hard to leave.

For those of you going to the Atlanta meetup next weekend, see you there.

To the rest of you...

See ya round.

Love,
@SirCork