Orlando Enrique Fiol
Nov 1 · 2 min read

Dear Valerie,

I again hope you will see this response, since I am very unclear as to where it’s being posted.

I am a very aural/oral person, for obvious reasons. Unlike so many of today’s “sightlings,” I don’t wrap up my intellectual identity in the written word. I kept journals in my twenties and faithfully wrote daily morning pages while thrice working through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way in 1997. At the end of it all, I was whinier and more self-centered than when I started. Very little actual creative writing ensued and I began to realize that there are certain things people can do under deadlines and others that they must do without any external pressure. Especially after being browbeaten during my dissertation process to write, write and write some more, I am especially sensitive to all this writing rhetoric on Medium. We are supposed to write everything down. Every experience and internal observation is apparently fodder for a blog post, novel or memoir, the more confessional, the better. Not coincidentally, the same gurus and gurettes insisting on this mandatory writing regimen complain about not getting out enough, about struggling with eating disorders, obesity, depression, Aspurger’s syndrome, borderline personality and a host of other painful conditions. They never stop to think that perhaps it is this unhealthy obsession with Medium writing that keeps them insulated from the lives they could be out there enjoying in a world apart from friggin flat screens. Sure, they may earn thousands per month from Medium writing, but at what cost? At the cost of becoming even more misanthropic and socially awkward than ever? At the cost of every real life friend taking a number in line to their daily Medium agenda? At the cost of every new acquaintance being “hit up” for some kind of monetary support? If that’s what I takes to earn a decent living here, I prefer to keep scuffling and scrounging for gigs, music students and that elusive professorial post. I don’t want to become a person whose only use for my fellow human beings is as writing fodder or consumers of my pseudo-motivational, impersonal and clich-éridden crap. The dream these people are trying to sell us is akin to the farcical promises of instant and processed foods in the 1950s.

I’m here to expand my mind, which I already do with my voracious reading. I’m not here to be pummeled into becoming a worshiper at the Temple of the Medium Writers’ Cult. Writing is wonderful, but it is far from my God or my tangible proof of truth. If I could train Medium’s algorithms never, ever, ever to send me another post about motivation or writing, I would do it before finishing this sentence. Help! How can I escape this dizzying, mind-numbing barrage? How can I find genuine rather than surface connection on a forum that supposedly attracts brilliant and progressive minds? Is this the end game of all our self-help, tough love, therapy and spirituality? To make everyone in our midst genuflect in front of the Medium Writer’s Cult?

    Orlando Enrique Fiol

    Written by

    Totally blind, Hispanic-Italian, , happily engaged, Christian pianist/keyboardist, hand percussionist, doctor of music theory. Email: ofiol@verizon.net