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Ah, I remember it like it was yesterday...

and the feeling in my stomach as I lived through my first +30% drop in the value of my holdings. It was back in 2017 and I had only started trading a month or two earlier after taking a few hundred Steem out to Poloniex. I had managed to *accidentally* increase my holdings relatively well and as the prices were climbing, I had increased it to a couple of thousand dollars worth. I felt pretty good. 

My wife and I had just arrived at her parent's Summer cottage when the prices plummeted as I watched and there was nothing I could really do, as I had not idea what doing something would look like. That pit in my stomach was deep and my wife just didn't get it and wanted me to spend time enjoying the sunshine. But I couldn't and I told her, *I just lost 700 dollars!*

https://i.imgur.com/a7aiHYJ.jpg

There was one of my main errors at that time as while I was trading, I didn't really know what I was doing and instead of trying to increase my holdings, I was looking to increase my dollar values. In a bull market, that is easy, even if bleeding tokens. These days, I don't often look at the value of my holdings at all as, that really only matters to me if I ever sell them into fiat, and while I entertain the idea often enough, I have no plans. 

I hadn't lost 700 dollars at all. What I had lost was the opportunity to push out to USD (No tethers at the time - that I knew about anyway) and then buy back to increase my token stack near the bottom. I don't know how many opportunities I missed, and still miss. I am not a great trader like some purport themselves to be, I still don't really know what I am doing.

But one thing that I have got much better with is that pitted stomach feeling. The most recent time I have felt it was when the Tron news was announced that sounded *very bad* the other day, but it was nothing in comparison to that day at the Summer place - and that was only 700 dollars worth, whereas the threat the other day was three years worth of work worth. 

Being on Steem or in crypto has essentially desensitized me to some kinds of loss, or at least the prospect of loss. Perhaps it is all the FUD that the last three years has carried that has made me far less reactive to what would be considered wild swings. I also think that back then I was missing a vital piece of the puzzle. 

For my first six months on Steem, I had no community, no people, no support. I am not talking about vote support as I had managed to get a little of that ad since I was posting more like a crazed animal, that little added up. What I mean was, I had no friends, no one I could rely on to be there and have a laugh with over the good and the plentiful chunks of bad. I ended up getting invited into  a chat room, and then things changed. 

Once there, I met a lot of people I didn't know existed on Steem, good people, funny people, intelligent people and - *less so.* However, what it did do was give me a community, a small group of people from literally all walks of life and regions in the world that I could joke around with. But when shit hit the fan, so to speak, they were also there for advice and, more jokes. Humor is probably the best way to deal with most dramas, including failing economies and prices. 

The red arrow marks the stomach churning drop that ruined my weekend.

![image.png](https://files.steempeak.com/file/steempeak/tarazkp/i7zjVg8Z-image.png)

As you can see, *just prior* to that drop was a sharp run up to $1.29 before pulling back to 75 cents. Ha, spike... *what was I thinking...?* Not only that, only *six days* before the run up to the peak, the price of Steem was 26 cents. That pit in my stomach was made by the loss incurred and still holding *300% gains.* Pathetic. 

Somewhere in the green area is where I held my wife in the kitchen and said, *it will be okay.*

![image.png](https://files.steempeak.com/file/steempeak/tarazkp/2R3RxI8M-image.png)

It is interesting to look back and remember those feelings of what would essentially be *entitlement,* where I felt I was losing something that I didn't actually own. The fiat value wasn't mine - the tokens in the wallet were. Look after the tokens, and the value will take care of itself, or not. There is a lot of market manipulation, a lot of trading bots, a lot of a lot that is outside my control. The only thing I can really lose is what I actually have control over as, if I don't control it, it isn't mine. 

I was looking at my Steem holdings the other day and was thinking that since that green circle added to the chart, I have increased my tokens through work and buying with the fiat I earn from working about 8-fold. Price however is down about 40x from the highs.

While I held my wife in the kitchen during the toughest years of either of our lives and said it will be okay, I didn't sell, I held all the way down. Yes, it would have helped us, it would have made a significant difference, but here we are, still standing without having cashed out, finding our feet without crypto. People can say that we are stupid and perhaps we are. 

But the thing of it is that I feel that if I had cashed out back then, I may never have got back in fully, I would have been too scared to lose what I held. I also feel that if our lives were improved in that way at that time, we might not truly appreciate what we experienced, we wouldn't have felt the coldness of rock bottom, we wouldn't have discovered that there was more in us - as we have today. 

The only way to truly discover potential, is to live with nothing left to lose  - even when there is everything on the line. 

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]

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