My 2019: Achievements and Failures contest entry - reflecting on milestones and miles traveled!

Greetings, Steemians! I’m capitalizing on an opportunity to enter @anomadsoul and @blocktrade's' My 2019 contest. 2019 has been a wild ride for me, personally. I planned on doing this post even before I saw the contest announcement, so I may as well attempt to nab some of that sweet, sweet digital cheddar. I’ve been compiling some of my 2019 milestones, and admittedly, ignorantly failing to face my 2019 defeats. This’ll be a great exercise in ownership of both […in a public forum]. Without further adieu, here are the home runs and strike outs of My 2019!

Achievements

I’m happy to announce, there were a disproportionate amount of achievements over failures. It wasn’t until I started drafting this blog post/contest entry, that I realized that. Maybe I tend to dwell on the misses more than the hits; something I’ll have to evaluate about myself considering we’re coming up on a New Year. I do this thing at the beginning of each year, where I decide on an aspirational goal. Something that seems SO far out of my reach when I commit to it. In 2018, it was publishing my book, Dark Pinup, with @wcpublishing.

New Zealand and Australia

Sorry, but I’m going to start with the paramount achievement of the year. Everything will seem underwhelming after this. My 2019, I travelled and shot in Auckland and Christchurch, New Zealand and Melbourne Australia! If you’ve ever watched The Office, that is my hometown. Scranton, PA. Other than myself and @ryanashely, people just do not leave Scranton. For the last seven years, when shooting in LA, I’ve often thought to myself, “…I can’t believe I’m here.”. New Zealand and Australia was that, x1000.

I committed to that trip in January. December, January and February are awful months for freelancers, typically. @vermillionfox and I were living a life during 2017 that seemed too good to last. Spoiler alert. It was […as we all know, too well]. LA and New York, my usual destinations for work, weren’t booking like they had in years past. I mentioned to @vermillionfox that pinup models in Australia had been asking me to come there for years, so I suggested it as a half-serious possibility. Once I announced it, the response was overwhelming.

The poetic irony is that I wouldn’t have made this journey if the pains of the bear market hadn’t happened […don’t get to sentimental yet because I haven’t gotten to my Failures]. What I mean is, if STEEM had gone to $20 and I had more money than I knew what to do with, I can be almost sure I wouldn’t have traveled to those beautiful countries. I’m sure I would have bought a new camera or MacBook Pro, but I wouldn’t have booked a trip to the other side of the world unless I had to. It ended up being a life changing experience, and I even got to draw w/ @veryspider! I’ll keep those memories forever.

10,000 STEEM POWER

Some of the runner up achievements for My 2019 include, but aren’t limited to, hitting 10,000 STEEM POWER…again. Once upon a time, I was a dolphin in the SP department. When things started to go ass up in 2018, I had to power down and sell some of my holdings […not just STEEM, but other tokens I’d earned and bought during the bull run]. The hope was to just survive the crash, but as history will show, the bleeding never stopped […as I’m writing this, BTC just dropped below $7K, so that couldn’t be more true].

In hindsight, I sold on the way down. It was to sustain our family, so I don’t regret it, but there were quite a few thresholds that were painful to gross. Four digit STEEM POWER was a bitter pill to swallow. There was a moment when it set in that this wasn’t a temporary thing and the entire blockchain/cryptocurrency space was losing 90% of it’s value. When Steemit Inc. cut costs, upgraded tech and software and committed to making sure the platform survived, I could have bailed…but I decided to double down. I started posting more and buying STEEM. It was a celebratory moment when I powered up to 10,000 STEEM POWER again. A big personal milestone for me.

Passive Income

Leading up to 2020, especially in the first half of the year, I was feeling exhausted, fatigued and kind of resentful of my career. That sounds insane to most of you, I’m sure, considering what I do. It was mostly the travel, the workload, the frustrated clients […which in turn frustrated me], and the pace. Having brunch with my friend Cora of The Lingerie Addict, she said “…the way your doing this; it’s not sustainable.” She was right. For a year, I’d been receiving royalties from @wcpublihsing for Dark Pinup, and I’d began thinking more about passive income.

A decade overdue, I finally decided to commit to selling prints of my work. I’d slowly started the work on an Etsy shop, thinking about what I could sell that would have a personal touch. There are quite a few offerings I still have to make, but getting the listings online before 2020 was a goal that I did meet. The second part of that is having any success, but when @vermillionfox and I sold out of signed prints of @ryanashley and made more than our mortgage in one day, I knew I was on to something. It just reinforces that passive income needs to be a big part of next year’s story […that includes Steemit posts].

Failures

Man, @anomadsoul is brutal with the choice of vocabulary, lol. Accurately said, he mentioned that life is a rollercoaster and there are inevitable downs to accompany those adrenaline fueled ups. One of my favorite things about Steemit and my time here, is reading about those personal, changing circumstances. They’re especially cathartic when they coincide with my own troubles. @exyle’s VLOG’s, especially this past year, were a calm, rational voice for me when I panicked. @eveuncovered threw down a post about no longer being able to live off Steemit blogging at the same time @vermillionfox and I were hunting for jobs. I’d even read a few of @anomadsoul’s dingy “back of a van” freewrites while stuck in the back of plane or bus. There were better things we’d all like to be doing with our time, but we were going through things together […in a sense].

Bear Market Consequences

As I mentioned at the top, there were more successes than failures, and as I’ll address, some of those were out of my control. 2018 was a devastating year. @vermillionfox’s retail store closed in 2017 and after accessing our finances with $5 STEEM, it seemed sustainable that we could both blog full time while I still traveled and booked shoots. 2018 was all holding out hope, and 2019 was the crushing reality that we wouldn’t be able to survive on Steemit. There were a few “hair on fire” moments, not just for us, but Steemit as well. Sadly, I had no choice but to sell a massive amount of my holdings. Not because I didn’t have faith in a returning bull market, but because I had no choice.

Photography Backlog

Another goal I set but wasn’t able to achieve was finishing my backlog of photography work. The editing process takes me so long. One photo can take three hours, depending on the model and lighting situation. The volume of shoots I did in 2019 was more than any year prior, and I’ve been tryin and failing to get caught up on everything I fell behind while working on Dark Pinup’s release deadline. That almost put me a year behind, and it’s been an impossible task to get ahead. Going in to 2020, I’m still almost 30 clients behind. It’s hard to believe, but my New Zealand and Australian shoots were six months ago and I’m just getting to them all now.

Another Steemfest :(

This one really sucked for me. By the time the first Steemfest happened, I was just grasping what a revolutionary moment this all way. Steemfest 2 and 3 sounded amazing, and we’re more or less, at the apex of the social on blockchain adoption. I, of course, was booked in various cities around the country with commitments I couldn’t break. This year, I was actually home, but @lovejoy and I were both scraping together money just to sit for Gorkha Palace’s lunch buffet on Fridays. We couldn’t have been further away from attending Steemfest from a financial perspective.

So, that’s it! The good and the bad. Overall, even writing this post, I’m pretty happy with how the year went. Sure, I could have done better, but @tarotbyfergus’ most recent reading, “Tarot Reading for the beginning of the week”, mentioned being present for the storm. That’s how most of my year has gone. I’ve accepted the things that came, made the best of most situations and continued to manifest the things I wanted for my life, my career, and my future. Thanks for reading, if you made it this far. One day I’ll write a memoir about my life and 2019 will be just a chapter. Nice to know I can always return to Steemit for these memories!