 It all started with Dogecoin in January of 2021 and since then I've been married to crypto. My first bull  cycle was entertaining and seeing my portfolio grow left me on the edge of my seat. At the time, my life consisted of school and watching crypto streams all night covering the parabolic gains in the crypto space. However, there were other moments where I lost money due to inexperience and “fomo” that brung me down back to earth. Throughout this piece I talk about how I feel during the current bear market and the harsh lesson that I learned from the previous bull cycle. 

  Although this is my first bear market I am not frightened by the downward trend of the crypto market and I refuse to leave. I knew the bear market was going to eventually come and I am mentally prepared for more downward price action. Honestly, with this being my first bear market I am actually entertained by the reactions of everyone in the crypto/NFT community. It’s interesting to see what are everyones thoughts are on crypto twitter and how they plan to navigate the bear market. I plan to use this time to learn and acquire capital so that I can set myself up for success in the next bull cycle. I have two twitter accounts, one strictly for NTFS and another for crypto/DeFi. You can gain a lot of knowledge from following the right people in this space who create educational content. Twitter lists is a feature I like to use to stay up to date with my favorite crypto twitter accounts. Crypto twitter is obsessed with following accounts that “shit post” and recycle the same memes everyone else is using. I'm not bashing people who like to “shit post” but after a while I feel like the memes just get old and annoying. It is in my best interest to avoid these accounts and soak up as much knowledge as possible. 

 The only micro-cap token that I still have in my portfolio is $brush. Some people may ask, why didn't I sell my $brush tokens? Well, it’s because I believe in the Dev team and what they are building for PaintSwap. PaintSwap is the best NFT marketplace in the Fantom ecosystem and going cross chain will definitely help PaintSwap in the future. The dev team always underpromises and over delivers which gives me confidence that PaintSwap can be the go-to marketplace for NFTS in other ecosystems. Throughout the bear market the dev team is still making improvements to PaintSwap such as integrating trait filtering and an NFT bridge. Currently, everyone is waiting for PaintSwap V3 which will make PaintSwap an advanced NFT marketplace.

 However, the obvious lesson I learned from the previous bull run is to take profits. I did not take profits from $Doge when it went up to 64 cents. I did not take profits when Cardano nearly reached $3 nor did I take profits when $brush went to an all time high of 25 cents. I was being too greedy thinking that they will all go higher and now I am almost at nothing. I fed into the “HODL” culture thinking that prices would go higher and that mindset prevented me from selling at all time highs. Next time I will block out the noise and do what’s best for my portfolio. 

 With that being said, I am confident that we will see a crypto rally and the bull market will resume early 2023 or possibly 2024. I learned some hard lessons from the previous bull cycle but learning from my mistakes will make me a better investor. Now is the time for me to learn and acquire capital so that I can buy in at low entry points and accumulate. I am awful at timing the market so my strategy is to dollar cost average into assets that I have the most conviction in. Bear markets can provide life changing opportunities and I will capitalize at these low price points. 