ALOVE LETER to the pond- reflections on the surfance and at the HEART of the minnow support project

I had a beautiful travel photography post all queued up for Monday, but I decided to pull it at the last minute and spent some time taking a good look at myself and my work here so far. I thought maybe I'd share it with all of you.
I was flipping through pictures from Fiji looking for inspiration — feeding schools of silvery fish from my fingers (above,) and kayaking ten miles up a winding river to find sage advice on a blackboard in a native village full of children learning true community values (below,) and once again my work seems to line up with my internal struggles. I'm coming into my second month with the Minnow Support Project, and outside of the post I made about the creation of the new website, I haven't really written about the pond at all. If you're willing to go without some of my photography for one more day, I thought I'd share some of what's been going on with with me in regards to MSP. I feel compelled to explain why PALnet is the largest (and growing) off-chain Steemit community, and why it really matters.

On Monday, some stuff that had been creeping up on me came to a head. You may or may not know that I moderate for the Minnow Support Project, as well as partner with @FollowBTCNews on a rapidly growing witness project. I spend, on any given day, at least 12 hours on the discord server helping new and old members alike. I help keep things clean and fun; I patrol channels for abuse and spam; every bit of SP I make is delegated back into the community bots; I give advice, mediate, and motivate on an individual and group level; I send Steem to new members and help with registrations; counsel posting improvements one-on-one; I'm beginning to work with MSP-Waves as a DJ; I quietly curate a growing group of minnows I see who are community minded (some of them may not even know that I vote on their posts, until now, when they go back looking) and I have started sending out bounties for random acts of kindness that I see happen in chat on a daily basis.

I put my heart and soul into MSP —

as a minnow myself, I put as much as I can into helping @alanw and @steemvotes and the rest of our witnesses build the type of community that I know could change lives.

Where I'm going with this is simply to show that in a lot of ways, I feel like I need to put myself into MSP. Since I'm not a big fish yet, it's the only real gift I can give. I never really thought much about what I take from the pond. So circling back around to Monday and the post that failed to launch, I thought I'd tell you that I experienced the taking first hand. The day was hard. It was long. Someone came after MSP again, there were a number of meltdowns that I spent the day in DMs working to calm, I had a number of projects I needed to finish up. And then, while I was a little more drained and a little more vulnerable than normal, a thing happened in my day to day life that reopened a fresh wound. It's the kind that isn't healed yet — the ones that you celebrate just getting to the point of allowing to scab over without picking at, the ones that itch and prickle to remind you that they're just waiting to tear and bleed your emotions out uncontrollably. I caught this tender, susceptible cut to my spirit on something: a minor mishap, a small bump that I could normally weather. Instead, it tore and every bit of me came trickling out, from a drip that escalated with the beating of my heart into a torrent that I just couldn't stop. I mean, I ended up standing in the middle of a mosh-pit at a show I'd been waiting months for, with tears streaming down my face, standing still in a sea of chaos.

This is kind of not the sort of thing I'd normally be up to share. But I'm not writing it here to drum up sympathy; instead, I just want to say that when I needed to, I took from MSP. I drank deeply from the pond, and fuck me, it helped.

This is the true value of the Minnow Support Project on PALnet.
Trail your fingers in the water. Cool your fevered brow.

Yes, we have voting bots, and amazing services, and workshops, and a radio station... but we also have an entire school of people who actually — actually — give a shit about making Steemit better. And when I came on Monday, all I did was mention in passing that I had a bit of a bad day, and that swirling maelstrom of fins and love came churning wildly and enveloped me. Private messages full of support and handwritten poems and caring sentiments about why I'm appreciated. Tags in every channel from people just to say hi, to shoot me a kind word, to make me laugh, and to take my mind off it. Posts and artwork and music all gently pushed into my hands to keep them occupied.

There is nothing that you can pay that will buy you that kind of joy and acceptance... and we have so much of it in MSP, we're just giving it away.
If you were one of the people who reached out to me in the last two days, know fully that I love and appreciate you. You are the people who keep me active, keep me honest, keep me working, and yes... to some degree, keep me paid. You are the ones who create steemes of my god damn face every single day. You are the inspirations and the motivations, the bright, the varied, the brilliant, and the real. Thank you for taking a chance on this community, and by making it better with your presence, your god awful jokes, your beautiful talents, and the occasional late night gravy clown orgy.

Are you still here?
Thanks. Truly. I'll make it up to you with pictures of New Zealand. But in the meantime, if you want a few upvotes, a few friends, and a few laughs, come and find me on Discord. Especially if you're having a bad day.