✨THROWBACK THURSDAY ✨ For those of you who don't know me so..

✨THROWBACK THURSDAY ✨ For those of you who don't know me so well, perhaps this story will help you 🙈 It is a story of bootstraps 🥾 Craigslist jobs 🔨 , and tits 🍈 . It is the story of how I survived communism 🔴 . If you are only here for the bobs kindly skip the rest of the story and head straight to the inbox for your daily dose of sugar, I am sure there are much more titillating things in your timeline today than my story and you don't want to waste your precious fapping time. So just go see something else. For those who stayed... I like you 😌, but also... These selfies were taken in February 2012, ten years ago. You know they are ancient because in the second picture I am using an iPhone 4s 📱. It was the first smartphone I ever got, it felt like the biggest W of my life to be able to afford it 💵 . Notice the smudgy mirror, it also betrays how old the pictures are... I wasn't as polished or as glam as I am today and I didn't care. 😂 The story of these pictures is the story of a Personal Victory ✌️. A W over communism, depression ☔️ and hopelessness ⛈ . It was the first time after moving across the globe ✈️ 🌎 where I felt like I finally had a thin layer between me and doom aka moving back. You see, two years prior I was living in the thick of tropical communism 🌴 in a small country on the topmost part of South America called Venezuela 🇻🇪. You might have seen something about this in the news 🗞 or reddit or something.. but it was pretty bad 😞. It was a 13 year sad march down Communist Lane and by the winter ❄️ of 2009 our food was rationed 🥘, we had daily power cuts 💡 , curfew ⏰ , and water shortages 💦 . It was bad, pretty bad 😞 Wages were so low I was making less than $20 per month working 12 hour shifts at HBO Latinamerica 😭... after a year saving every penny 🐖 my savings were the equivalent to $215.... but with some luck and by some trick of marxist kung fu 🥋 I was able to buy dollars 💵 with a preferential rate and managed to turn it into $900. Don't try to understand how $215 can turn into $900, it's marxist economics and black markets ⚫️ . Still, in the darkest night of my soul 🌚 I decided if I was going to drown I might as well drown somewhere more pleasant 🏖 , and so my cousin gave me her Delta miles so I could purchase a ticket to the US 🎫 . A bag with all my clothes 🧳 , $900 in my backpocket and I left 🛩 🛋 Crashed at a friend's house in Miami, slept on an air mattress in the hallway, lived on Maruchan instant ramen 🍜. Didn't know what to do or how I was going to swing it ⚾️ , the only thing that was clear to me, clear as day, was I was never going back to Venezuela 🇻🇪 . So I decided to pull my mercurial boots 🥾 out of the proverbial mud by using every skill I had 🔨 . It was a very wide yet shallow pond. I knew how to apply make up decently 💄 , I could retouch pictures 📸 , I could put two words together with some flair ✏️ . And for a while I lived off retouching pictures $10 a piece, doing make up for Craigslist strangers, and writing soulless articles for a website called about.com. My best make-up customers were colorful people, I had an older woman 👩 who rented hotel conference rooms to give motivational speeches to other older women on how life can still be fun at 50 🥂 and a stripper from Eastern Europe named Angelina Devine 💃 who I suspected offered extras to her customers 🍆 In retrospect 👀 even though I owned my schedule 📆 , it was as drab as any 9-5 drone job and I was barely scraping by, but I loved it 💗 because it meant I could be free 🦅 . I could live and breathe and go to the supermarket 🥫and buy food 🥙and not worry about riots 💣 or power cuts ⚡or the looming fear that the government was going to close the borders and trap us all in there forever, like Cuba 🇨🇺 Time went by ⌚and it wasn't always easy. I would lose a customer... get fired from About.com...Nothing is more terrifying than seeing your bank account dwindle when you have nothing else and nobody to rely on 😟 . At a few points I seriously had to consider going back. A friend told me: "right now you aren't ready to stay here, when your bank account reaches $0 you will be ready." I kept fearing I would go broke and have to go back but by the time I ran out of money I had figured out another way to stay afloat ⛵️ . Sometimes it isn't about logical rational thinking, but about blind faith 👩‍🦯 Eventually I found camming and it was the biggest gift 🎁 anyone could have given me. Thanks to camming and to you guys, I was able to build a little cushion to stay afloat, safe, away from my biggest fears.. and after 9 years, I not only shut the door on a bleak past, but have opened many great doors for my future.