Medium Is My Safe Space
I’ve received nothing but kindness and good advice here.
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I’ve been on the internet a long time. I remember the days of dial-up, when you had to choose whether you wanted to check your email OR place a phone call. I remember in middle school when my parents installed a Net Nanny to try to limit the amount of time I spent on the internet, and trying everything to get around it and spend more time online.
I remember learning HTML and creating Sailor Moon websites, discovering FanFiction.net and spending countless hours reading fan-created stories about my favorite Lord of the Rings characters, and going into AOL chat rooms to lie about my age.
That last part makes me cringe — I remember telling people in chat rooms who were most likely grown men that I was 16, because to my 12-year-old mind, this made me feel mature, worldly, and very unlikely to be stalked or kidnapped. I remember feeling approval and acceptance when these strangers in the chat rooms (again, likely grown-ass men) would compliment my vocabulary and call me smart because I used the word “pedantic” one time after hearing it that day in 7th grade English class.
In 2020, the internet is a very different place. I’ve gotten nasty comments (both publicly-posted and privately messaged to me) on nearly every platform I’m a part of — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, reddit, Twitch, YouTube, and even email. But do you want to take a guess at the one place I’ve received only kindness? Medium.
Maybe it’s because the average age of Medium users skews slightly higher than that of Instagram, and with age often (but not always) comes maturity. Or maybe it’s because this is a place for baring the depths of my soul to complete strangers, and forming an arguably more intimate connection here with my readers than I ever do while speaking into a camera on YouTube. Maybe the driving forces that spur one to make an unnecessarily rude remark or message a photo of one’s penis to another simply don’t exist here. Or maybe it’s just that writers, being the sensitive creatures we are, possess a much deeper empathy than the average internet denizen, so we’d never dream of textually retaliating to some perceived slight to our pride the way that other online communities do.
Or maybe I just haven’t been around long enough to find the trolls — either way, I quite like it here. I think I’ll stick around.
