Not Back At It, Still At It

I’ve been largely absent from Medium now for the past few months. I’ve been reading and commenting, but I haven’t been writing. Around the time of the (weirdly handled) membership rollout, I started to have misgivings about the platform. Not about the people writing here, but about the platform itself. Suddenly, monetization seemed to be the most important thing and a lot of the discussion revolved around money and the platform itself, which was a bit of a turn off.

I also needed a break because I found myself becoming a little too concerned about my statistics. Not just who likes and comments, but about how many people viewed it and how many people read the whole thing. It’s like when I used to track my stats on my business blog very carefully, I started obsessing (only a little) about what made this post so much more readable than that post and starting considering whether I wanted to write about something based on how I thought people might respond to it.

So I took a break, but only from Medium. I still wrote pretty much every single day (I miss a day once in a while…life happens), but kept it mostly to myself. I do appreciate the community here and there are a lot of great reads here.

I want to pay more attention to the people and not the personalities, if you know what I mean. I am tired of thinly veiled sales pitches from ten thousand wanna-be life coaches. I am tired of articles about how to write a viral piece or how to write to boost your stats. I am tired of the people who are always doing a schtick and whose every post screams, “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!” Those entires are all fine, too, if that’s what you like, but it’s not for me.

I want to spend my time reading about people and what they’re doing and what they’re thinking and feeling. I enjoy everything Gail Boenning writes about and Shirley Lee’s posts are always intersting to me. I like what they’re writing they’re just sharing pieces of themselves—they’re not trying to tell me about how white my shirts can be.

So from now on, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m just writing to write, not to serve my statistics. So be warned, you are probably going to see a surge in the amount of stories about hammocks, Daisy, bike rides and summer afternoons.