What being here means to me

By here, I mean to say both in read.cash and noise.cash. As some of you may know I started my journey here at read.cash a week after I tried posting on noise.cash.

The verification that the site is indeed legitimate made me more willing to give read.cash a chance. And I am glad I did. A few days shy of my 2-month here and I already had so many things to be grateful for.

Where was I before being here?

Technically, I never left my home since the pandemic started except for the few meetings with friends for business planning. Mentally though, I was not in a good place. I was in a place full of worry. The worries include numerous things, some are serious while others are easily handled on their own but became too much with other worries too.

I remember that in February I also discovered read.cash but I found out that I cannot cash out my earnings immediately because my coins.ph wallet is not verified. I did not make an account for it because back then I needed to cash out every bit of money I had for online classes.

The months that follow are filled with me using different earning apps just to get some amount of money for buying load that I used for data connection during online classes.

Some apps take a month to give P25 while some take only 2 weeks for P30. Back then, this is already a big thing for me as I was stuck waiting on our late stipend. It is funny to think now that I am getting more in a day here than I did with multiple apps.

How do I spend my money?

When the stipend I am waiting for finally arrived, I stopped using all the earning apps because I did not find a need for them anyway. I started thinking of where to put my money where it can grow.

The first place that my money went is to our small business of course. I am hopeful about the future of our shop that I did not hesitate to put my money there.

Next is I gave my parents money to help pay the bills. I also gave them some capital for their own side hustles, and they sometimes give me money from it. Moreover, I also gave them some money to use for their wants. When I have money, I wanted my parents to know that it is okay to spend some money for themselves instead of thinking about us all the time.

I also gave my sisters some money because since it is a pandemic we received no allowance from our parents which means that they are broke. And they cannot buy things for themselves. So I give them money so they can buy the things they want.

I also invested some of my money in the GInvest feature in GCash. Lastly, and my most favorite thing to do, I donate a part of my money. This donation varies from me using both Shopee and GCash for donating to different organizations to looking for different hashtags where people ask for help.

Donating has become a major part of my life since I started getting my stipend when I was in high school. In the next academic year, I will be third year in college and I am still doing it and the amount is getting bigger too since my stipend increased.

Of course, I also save some money for my wants. This money is usually spent on my cravings or when I make an impulse buy during sales.

Finally rediscovering read.cash

Having managed my money properly this time made me worry less. I am just enjoying my time knowing that if something ever happened, I would have some money that I have set aside.

This is the moment I rediscovered read.cash in April. The fact that I cannot cashout the money did not deter me anymore because I have some more money to spend.

I made an account in noise.cash first because I was interested in one of the site rules where everyone has to be respectful to other users. This is something that I wanted since I became inactive on Tumblr. I wanted a place where I can share my poems again without anyone knowing who I am.

It turns out that noise.cash will provide me more things than I expected. I found people who are kind to me and cheer me up when I am down. I found people who support me when I share fan arts I never posted on other sites. I also received a lot more than what I thought was possible.

I made an account in read.cash to post some of my longer thoughts as well as to challenge myself into writing longer things instead of just writing poems over and over. I do not know if I managed to improve since the first post I made but one thing I am sure of is that I have managed to find joy in writing again. It no longer brings the same kind of anxiety it used to bring when I was on Tumblr.

What happened in my stay on Tumblr?

This might be a question in your mind so I will share a short version of it. I started writing on Tumblr during my Grade 11 days. It was when I was in the midst of my fight with depression (not that it ever ended). I found a haven in writing my thoughts and knowing that some people relate to my experience and feel grateful that someone can put our feelings into words made me so happy.

However, as my followers grew, the pressure that I put on myself also increased. Instead of just being happy with an engagement with a follower in one of my posts, I would feel bad when I see that a poem I posted received *only* 70 likes despite having thousands of followers.

I am not sharing this with humblebrag. There really is nothing to brag about being so lonely that my only source of happiness is strangers' approval. The time when I was just silently admiring people with 16 000 followers was long gone, I had even surpassed their mark when they deactivated after a little while I joined Tumblr. The only thing left was the feeling of wanting more but also being afraid of seeing more people seeing my works. I remember thinking then, that this must have been the reason the poets I admired left the platform. There was always the pressure of writing better and better poems.

To be honest, I enjoyed my time on Tumblr much better when I was only a small blogger than when I became big enough to receive messages telling me that my words are their motivation to continue on.

What made noise.cash and read.cash different?

On Tumblr, I had to make a separate blog for reblogging other people's content because everyone is so critical that a blog must have a theme. I remember that I will post some personal thoughts then delete them immediately because they did not go with my blog's "aesthetic".

This is entirely different here because I can just post whatever I want and people also enjoy it. Even if they do enjoy more content than the ones I am posting, I have never received a single comment telling me they like it better when I am just posting *insert something here*, and that they are unfollowing me if I keep posting content that I like.

Maybe I was just young back then because comments like that made me cry and overthink. The result would be me writing about topics I am no longer passionate about. I have stopped experimenting because I was afraid that people will say harsher words about my works. But now, even if I do receive a comment like that, I would probably just shrug it off because I cannot please everyone. I think that my stay on Tumblr helped solidify that belief in me even if it did take me a long time before I realized it.

Maybe the people here are just more respectful than the ones I encountered back then. All I know is that I have enjoyed interacting here far more than I enjoyed interacting on any other social media platform.

What do I get from being here?

Well, aside from the obvious generous amount of BCH, I also get a lot here than on any other sites. I have gotten to know amazing people who are not afraid to tell people that they worked hard for their success instead of trying to brush it off as luck. Additionally, everyone here just wants to see others succeed too. Aside from the rare ones filled with envy, all I can see in both noise.cash and read.cash are people applauding for other people's success. I love seeing that because I can feel that most are genuine in their happiness of seeing other people succeed.

Being here also challenged me to become a more consistent writer. Maybe not necessarily better (yet), but I have learned how to be more consistent in writing daily. Even if it is just a sentence or just a free-write session, I have been consistently writing since starting here. I guess that is a gift that I will forever be thankful for because it brought me something that helps calm my mind when everything becomes too much.

Most importantly, being here feels like the haven that I never found in any other sites. I feel like I can stay here for the rest of my life and still enjoy every minute of it. I might be a still kinda newbie user but I feel like I also grow together with the platform. The solace that I found just by staying here cannot be put into words. All I can say is that this is where I run to when the world becomes too much. In the short time that I was here, I have managed to feel at home and more myself than anywhere else.

You can find more of my articles by clicking this link:  https://read.cash/@ZehraSky/week-1-june-2021-articles-summary-6e15cf71

Feel free to browse through it, you might find something that is to your taste.

Thank you for reading and supporting me, everyone!