The Shades of Our Journey Await

Take a look at the featured image here and I'm going to tell you what it is.

You may already know it's a bridge, but if you look close, it's two bridges.

These bridges separate two towns: Steubenville, Ohio, and Weirton, West Virginia.

Seven years ago, there would've been a third bridge, the Fort Steuben Bridge, which has since been demolished. It was no longer needed, as it led to Weirton's once vibrant industrial sector but fell into such decay there was nothing more that could be done with it.

Two towns, two former steel mill towns in the Heart of the Rust Belt, located about forty minutes outside the Steel City, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

If one ventures further south they'll come across towns like Follansbee, West Virginia, where the stench of the old mills still lurk. Go further and you'll find some abandoned structures with rusty hearth stacks still standing.

There are old ghosts in those buildings, ghosts of a time long since passed, never to return.

From Mingo Junction to Brilliant to Yorkville to Belmont, such structures lay in decay.

Former steel workers have since retired from the old mills, their sons who once walked the corridors of the mills during their twilight area now take to the local bars in hopes someday the mills will be up and running again, and there will be work available to them once more.

Hope...there's hope...there's been hope for the past decade.

Nothing happened.

There's been hope for the past two decades.

Nothing happened.

Steubenville, Ohio is where the shades of my journey await.

Perhaps you have a similar story to tell.

Maybe you were in a situation similar to the sons of the old steel workers, where the job was once thought of as immortal, but has long since vanished into the depths of the Ohio River, drowning in the currents, never to return to the surface.

Hope Exists

We know hope exists, as we've all gravitated toward Wealthy Affiliate knowing something big is about to happen in our lives over the course of the next 18 to 24 months given we take to the training and all that is offered here.

Many of us have made such progress and are now walking the trail back to base camp to alert others who were once in a similar predicament.

Yes, hope does exist, and it exists right here.

Some of us have seen hopes and dreams turn into realities. Fantasies turned into real life.

Hope does exist, and it exists even more when we find something we're willing to put our minds to.

WA is that something.

We build site content, sometimes for over a year, before we see progress, traffic, and even that first tiny ray of hope.

But it's something.

It's the key.

The key to something great.

The key to an escape.

The key to another world, a world we once fantasized and dreamed about as kids but as we morphed into adulthood the wardrobe closed itself and that story we once read about a wardrobe transporting us to a magic land sunk into the darkest depths of our memories.

Perhaps that wardrobe returned to our own kids, if we have any, but in our heart of hearts, in our mind of minds, many of us knew we were fooling our kids until the harsh winds of reality swept their minds into the never ending cycle of wake up, work, pay taxes, and repeat.

For thirty-five-plus years.

But no, here that wardrobe opened its doors once more.

Ancient Magic

Of course the ancient magic exists, as we were all there when it was created, created in our own lives, when our parents planted the seeds of success in our minds.

Thus, the wardrobe opened.

Maybe it closed.

For some of us, it closed for a few years.

Others, more than a decade.

But, while walking in that eternal winter forest without a shred of hope something clicked, and the spell began to break.

Winter wasted away and spring sprung for the first time in an age, sparking a new era of hope, and the shades of our journey sprung with the blooming trees and plants as color returned to our world.

And it was no longer a fantasy; that fantasy became reality.

There is work to be done here at WA, but the shades of our journey were planted at a young age.