Please help. Asking for a friend. A friend who is actually me.

I'm not a programmer, but I think of myself as pretty bright in general, and I feel a pang of shame to admit that I have no idea what's going on here with Steemit. All the explanations I've found online for various questions seem to be in a different language. They looks like words, but they simply don't connect to form understandable concepts in my brain. I'd be eternally grateful for some quick, user friendly explanations that assume I've never taken a class in coding. I hope some people see this post somehow.

Questions:

1) How do I get my first Steem? I understand that it helps to delegate and invest those Steem somehow, and build reputation and Steem Power (which are still very abstract to me), but aside from not yet knowing how to really do that intelligently, I don't have any Steem with which to try. It looks like I have some pending from my "introduceyourself" post. Do I just wait for that to go through in 5 days, and then I'll be able to "delegate" them?

2) Why is it so hard to search for other users and subjects? When I use the search bar, it just does a google search. I could just use google for that. Why doesn't it search among the users and articles and tags on the Steemit platform? That seems like the more obvious use. If I want to just type in somebody's name and find their profile, how do I do that?

3) How do I spend Steem, or Steem Power, or use upvoting bots? Like what are the actual things I click on. I don't know how to find these magical bots and see what they're about. I've only seen articles that list a few and say that I should send them Steem. Do I need to time that with publishing an article, or will they upvote my last article, or what exactly will happen when I send them Steem? And do I need to have accumulated some Steem money and/or reputation to be able to do so? And do I need to communicate anything else to them other than just blindly sending Steem?

Sorry for angsting a little bit, gang. I just feel the need to get some sort of foothold in understanding this platform and it's etiquette, functions, and intelligent strategies before I continue putting in all the work into posting my essays. The last one got something like 2 views on here and over 2 thousand on Medium, and I figure there's gotta be a much smarter way to do this than just posting aimlessly.

Thanks!