CREATOR SPOTLIGHT

The Nurse With a Story to Tell

Gillian May built an enthusiastic following with her writing on health and wellness

7 min readApr 20, 2022

Every month here at Creators Hub, we feature a creator we admire on the platform. Next up is

, who has launched her writing career right here on Medium. She writes regularly on topics like mental health, addictions, trauma, and alcoholism.

Gillian May has a unique perspective — she’s both a former nurse and a recovering alcoholic, so she knows a lot about her subject matter. While she was an expert in her chosen topic when she first started on Medium, she was also a fairly new writer. And, as she notes below, Medium was useful to her as “a space to just start the process without feeling too pressured to make my writing perfect.” Now she has over 64,000 followers, and has become an authority in the health and wellness space.

We asked Gillian a few questions via email.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

If someone only read one of your Medium posts, which should it be and why?

Well, my most popular post is “The First Signs of Alcoholic Liver Damage Are Not in the Liver,” and I am very proud of this story even though it was emotional for me to write. It contains the story of my father’s death along with critical education about alcoholic liver disease, a condition that I write frequently about. But I wrote this story rather quickly and looking back, there’s probably a lot more I could have done with it to provide more clarity and education for people. So I think my best work is represented in the post “Why Alcohol Is More Dangerous for Women.”

This was a collaborative effort between myself and editor

Kate Green Tripp

who really helped me get clear on the vision of the story and the research. Kate helped me tease out the facts and encouraged me to find experts to interview, something I hadn’t done before. I feel like I really found a more journalistic and confident voice in this article. I also think the message is super important even though it’s slightly controversial. I’m committed, as a former nurse and recovering alcoholic, to help others learn the deeper health facts about alcohol use. For this post, I wanted to understand how alcohol affected women as I had been finding some startling facts in the research. Even though this post centers women (who often don’t get any spotlight in health research at all), I do feel strongly that anyone who uses alcohol should know more about its effect on our health. However, this article represents, for me, my best and most polished work.

How has writing on Medium helped you develop your voice as a writer?

Medium has been a major springboard for me in my writing career. I started reading Medium posts back in November 2018, then began writing in January 2019. I used Medium to start my freelance writing career. I wanted a safe space to just start the process without feeling too pressured to make my writing perfect. Medium is a great place to stretch your wings with actual published writing that anyone can read. I felt better knowing that my posts wouldn’t get seen too much right away because I was new. It gave me a safe place to experiment and try things without the pressure.

However, I quickly warmed up to the process and began writing frequently. It took a long time for any of my posts to really get seen as I needed to develop my voice, my message, and my goals. It was interesting to see how certain topics did better than others, but chasing algorithms was never my desire. Instead, I wanted to write about things that I knew would contribute something to others. I knew I had many stories to tell but it took a while to figure out how I wanted to tell them and what my ultimate message was.

Eventually I settled on promoting health and preventing illness through education around alcohol, addiction, and mental health. Being a former nurse, I have a lot to say about health promotion and illness prevention in these areas because our health care systems often don’t provide enough accessible education. There is also a serious lack of health promotion and prevention within the mental health and addictions industries. Writing on Medium helped me find a simple way to convey this education using my personal background and real-life stories. It was fascinating to me to see my combined experience as a nurse and recovering alcoholic (who also lost her own father to alcoholism) come to light in my voice. This voice was essentially birthed here on Medium and I’ll never forget that.

What are the last three profiles you’ve followed on Medium?

If I may, I’d like to tell you the last three profiles that I have followed that have impacted me the most. The first is

Adeline Dimond

, who always gives me comfort in her humorous take on middle-aged female life through the time of Covid-19, wars, and everything else going on. Even though she and I are so different, I still find myself in her writing and it entertains and calms me.

The second is

indi.ca

, who is an exceptional writer and thought leader living in Sri Lanka. I absolutely love his posts even though I find them sometimes shocking and unsettling. He is documenting all the world events from his lens in Sri Lanka and I am learning so much from him about how global events reverberate around the world. I think we’re all so stuck in our own bubbles that we rarely look elsewhere to see the different experiences of our fellow humans. I think this interests me even more as a Canadian woman now living in rural Colombia where I am also witnessing a totally different view of global events.

The last profile is

Annie Tanasugarn, PhD

, who writes candidly about PTSD and trauma and how these issues affect our health and relationships. This is a topic I am also committed to and because she is a therapist, I am learning a lot from her. I like the way she takes complex psychological terms and makes them accessible to any reader. That is something I am also committed to in my own work.

Is there a specific feature of Medium you really enjoy?

It’s taken me a while to get used to the new desktop and mobile app functions, but now that I have a handle on it, there are some definite positives about it. I think the main thing is seeing new writers on my homepage, in the side bars, and in recommended reading that all write about topics I’m interested in. I have found several new writers over the past few months, including those I mentioned above, which has been a cool experience for me. I think the new features of Medium are beginning to help us find interesting writing even though it took a while to get going.

What do you wish you’d known before starting to write on Medium?

There’s lots of advice people can give to other writers about what to consider before writing on Medium, however, I really feel that overthinking the process isn’t helpful. The best part about my start on Medium is that I casually heard about it through a writing coach and just decided to start writing knowing it was a free and open platform. So, I think “not knowing” can be helpful if you know what I mean? Because sometimes we push our creativity too hard to “produce” something that we don’t take the time to just experiment and see what interests us, what lights us up, what gives us passion.

For me, just the process of writing and trying things was the real learning, so long as I didn’t put excessive pressure on it. I think if I had tried so hard to “know” everything about Medium and writing ahead of time, it may have stunted my process. I think too many people come to Medium with dollars in their eyes and don’t come with a true desire to hone a writing voice and craft a passionate message that others can learn from. Since I didn’t know a lot about money making on Medium ahead of time, it helped me relax and write better. So I’d say to anyone who just discovered Medium, forget about the money part and just create first.

What’s the best piece of writing and/or creativity advice you’ve ever gotten?

I think the best writing advice came from my wife, who isn’t a writer. Many years back I was struggling so hard with getting words on the page because I felt so fearful of failure that I just couldn’t start. She was a teaching assistant for kids with disabilities and they had put a butterfly sanctuary in their classroom. I still tear up when I remember her using her elbows to mimic the flapping of wings from the newly emerged butterflies. She said that in order for the butterflies to learn how to fly they need to flap and flap for a while. It all looks like wasted time and energy but they actually need that struggle to learn and grow. So she reminded me that I likely needed to struggle too, because I was just learning and growing as a writer. Every time we put a word on the page, we’re flapping our wings. It may not look like much, but in that challenging and somewhat directionless process, we are figuring out how to fly with our words.