Taken from: here

I am a Venezuelan citizen who currently lives in Venezuela.

That sentence may seem painfully redundant to someone that hasn't heard of the deep crisis that affects my country, but the reason I wrote it is because when you live in my country, you are faced with challenges every day, and in this year, all of those challenges that I went through made me experience things that you would think they happen only in movies.

Starting this year, I was working for Utopian here on Steemit as a freelance translator. I had already been working with them for almost six months and I was satisfied with the position I had and the opportunity to grow as a professional that I had been given.

Taken from: here

I was saving money for a big project and had very clear intentions for my 2019: starting my very own website and learning to program.

The theme of the website was about language learning and I was more than motivated. I bought a web domain and a year-long hosting package, I started learning basic HTML, I wrote a couple of articles about how to start learning Japanese. My mind was 100% focused in this endeavor, and I was doing all of this while I worked for Utopian at the same time.

This is the logo I designed for my website: Polymet.

Everything was going great until March came around.

On March 7th, There was a nation-wide power outage in Venezuela that lasted 5 days. For five days we didn't have any electricity at all. We couldn't charge our phones, we couldn't use the air conditioner, we couldn't preserve food in the fridges, we were literally back to the old ages.

Many people died at hospitals back then, businesses lost hundreds and thousands of kilograms of food, and many food stores were raided by desperate people who didn't have anything to eat.

Chaos reigned, and everything I lived in March was full of pain. I wish I was exaggerating but as dramatic as this may sound, it was all a nightmare.

The blackouts continued throughout the whole month, we had so many blackouts we spent a total of 15 days without electricity in March. There were weeks when we only had electricity for 2 days. This situation started to affect my mental health, and near the end of the month it had completely destroyed my mom.

My mother has a small business in our house in which she sells fast food, and after the blackouts, since we couldn't use the fridges, most of the food that my mom would sell ended up rotting. By April, 2019, my mom had gone bankrupt.

Coupled with the fact that my mom had lost everything due to the blackouts, they continued to get worse. The electrical issue in my city was so bad, that the president decided that we would spend 12 hours a day without electricity.

In April I was the only person in my house who was working, and in many days I couldn't even work, because when there was no electricity I couldn't use my computer to translate the documents I was assigned to work on. Everything got worse and worse very fast. The money that I made translating wasn't enough to cover the expenses of my mom, my grandfather and I. We quickly sunk into poverty. Since my mom wasn't working anymore, money was scarce and there were days when we wouldn't eat anything. There were days when the only food we had was rice.

We were poor for almost 3 months. Our extended family would sometimes help us by giving us food, but that would only help us for one day or two, and after that we were back to eating nothing but rice.

In July, good things finally started to happen.

On July 1st, the electricity situation got a lot better, we would only have blackouts once a week. And on July 9th, my mom sold one of the three fridges in our house and with the money that she got, she was able to buy food and shortly after she reopened her business.

We were finally starting to get out of poverty and that allowed me to focus more on my projects. Since my mom started making money again, we were able to live without having so much financial stress. We also started eating a lot better than before.

On the one hand, things had finally gotten better for my mom. But on the other hand, I didn't turn out to be that lucky.

Near the end of July, Utopian announced that they would soon cease all activity on the Steem blockchain, and in August 1st, I was unemployed.

Everything that I had been through before Utopian's end didn't succeed in breaking me, but this one event completely destroyed me. I fell into depression. I felt utterly lost and devoid of motivation. The one thing that kept me going and gave me a sense of worth and financial security had suddenly been taken away from me.

I was once again, in the dark.

In the following days, with whatever little strength I could muster, I would send cv's and look for new jobs, to no avail.

August, September and October went by and all I did was studying programming and looking for jobs.

At last, on November 2nd, I received a call from one of the most prestigious English schools in my city, the one I most desired to work at and had applied for. I went and had two interviews, I took a written test for ESL teachers and taught one trial class as part of my evaluation process before they decided to hire me. When I was notified that I had been accepted to be part of the school staff I was filled with hope and excitement, the evaluation process I went through as an aspiring teacher was long because I had to observe many teachers teach their classes to learn how they did things in this school.

I was officially hired on November 19th. At first, I would still get hit with bouts of depression, everything that had happened still weighed heavily on me. Fortunately for me, the more I taught and the more I interacted with my students, the better I felt. This change that happened in my life has raised my vibration, and little by little I have finally been able to climb out of the hole I fell into after all of the painful experiences I went through this year.

One of my students even gave me a box of my favorite chocolate sweets as a gift in our Christmas party at the school ^^.

This picture taken with my phone.

While working at that school, I have been able to absorb the good vibes and energies of my coworkers and my students who, in spite of going through very similar problems because of the situation of Venezuela, persevere and go after what they want.

All in all, I'm still healing. This year I failed in learning to program, I failed to build my website, but I feel so glad to know that I will finish on the right foot this year, knowing that I achieved being accepted in the place that I wanted to work at. Now I feel useful once again. Now I'm motivated to start anew. And now I have regained the strength necessary to go after what I originally wanted this year. I couldn't do it in 2019, but I learned to be strong in the face of hardship. The dimmest glimmer of hope appeared in my life in November, and now I'm finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.