Introducing Annie: a Traveling, Writing, Eurasian Female

Funnily enough, I heard about Steemit around 6 months ago over a streetfood dim sum dinner with fellow Steemer @erico47. Although it sounded like a great idea, I stupidly forgot to ask how to spell it. And so, after months of querying various arrangements of the words “steam” and “it”- and getting increasingly frustrated by my results on different ways to steam vegetables, I’m finally here. And I have to say, it’s pretty damn fantastic!

After leafing through several trendy and not so trendy pieces, I realised that the overall quality of writing on this platform (at least from what I’ve come across) is pretty high. In the last few days, I’ve even managed to find myself lost on hour-long Wikipedia-like click-trails from universal basic income to how much good looks matter to pictures of orange sunsets.

But unlike wikipedia, it’s all actually been fun to read while still being very informational. And of course there’s also the option of earning cash directly from self-publishing- something that beats having to pitch articles to magazines that never reply or other platforms where the payment option does not exist. Of course I had to sign up.

Who am I?

I come from a mixed background with alcoholic Celtic roots from my father’s side and fiery East Asian blood from my mother’s. Having had the tiger-mum upbringing experience (anything lower than 90% on a test was a failure worth flagellation and child abuse), it took me to get to university to realise I actually hate the education system. And more than that. I hate the system in general.

Coming to terms with this, just a month and a half in of starting at University College London, I bought a £10 backpack from ebay and winged it on a journey that would take me between 40 countries on five continents by myself for over 2 and a half years.

And of course, a lot happened. To name just a few things, I learned to communicate in four new languages and whittled all my belongings down to a Ryanair cabin-size backpack. I also couchsurfed on five continents, got involved in Romania’s Colectiv Revolution, lived with Nigerian fraudsters, got stabbed and learned how to make argan oil.

It's been a nice ride.

Not only has this been significantly more exciting than spending my days in the same student bar each week drinking the same diluted vodka mixers, I feel it’s given me a more useful education too. If nothing else, it’s opened my mind to the complexity of the world- as well as its vastness.

It would make sense for me to write about travel, given it's taken up a lot of my time recently. And sure, I definitely intend to. But traveling alone is not enough- it’s simply a means to get somewhere else. And the place I’m most interested in getting to, as fluffy as it sounds, is a better world.

As such, this is what I intend to write on as well. Ideas towards making a better future- and this could be in anything from education, food, technology and people coming together for action. In fact, I already have a site, Sutava, where I try to write on these issues without injecting my political and occasionally semi-neurotic bias. It even has a Steemit account that you can check out if you'd like @sutava.

However, as any human, I also love trumpeting my own horn and feeling like my opinion actually matters. Thus, my account here is to take all of these issues with more of a personal touch- as well as extend their scope a bit. In particular I'm interested in a post-work world (when the only thing we'll have to be good at is being a human), how to reach it and how to make the most of it.

But as ever, time still has to be made for my more erratic and passing interests- like general observations and cool facts about camels.

Did you know that camels can absorb water vapour with their noses to prevent dehydration?!? I hope you didn't role your eyes. This piece of information blew my mind!

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I’m really excited to become a part of the Steemit community and get to know you all! If you feel you’d like my writing or are curious about any of the topics I’ve mentioned, please feel free to follow me @annielennon

And of course, drop some comments if you’d like to discuss anything I’ve raised here. If there’s any proof that I love a good discussion, my most recent result for the Myers Briggs test was ENTP, or “debater”. So, please, go ahead!