Celebrating 6 years with Medium
Before, I share my feelings about Medium it would be great to show you my idea of collective celebration. Or, my inadequacy in doing so. Group gatherings are always challenging because you need to follow certain rhythms of your group. Sometimes you fall of the track and it gets documented in photos. People look at the cameras when you mercilessly attack the piece of cake. They smile as you eat and they eat when you are ready to smile. At the same time I enjoy the very idea of collective writing in one centralized domain. In this case we get to smile and eat whenever we want and we get to document it ourselves.
I always dreamed about a platform which makes it easy to write and share your thoughts with others. I tried many of them. When I saw medium it was love at the first sight. Before I used to type in Blogspot and I even got to a certain point where one of my posts reached 90k-100k views. In Medium, I needed to start with baby steps.
Everything was simple and easy to grasp. There were so many people that were just like me. (Cake eaters.) They would immerse themselves in writing and putting the best content out. Yet, some of them would brag about crazy money they made by writing which pushed me out of my chair at times.
Every writer has this dilemma. (Writing money dilemma.)
Making money from what you write is like making love to your girl and accepting cash for it. It feels weird. First, because you love her and you do not do it for money in the first place. Second, because you feel good about the fact that you made money from an activity which is intimate and very important for you. (In a way that you do not see yourself doing something else.)
Although, we all know that 90% of all publish material will never see 200 book copies or more. 90% of authors will always suffer from material shortage and bad timing. They will never be in trends and never will reap the fruits of their labor while being alive. Medium seemed like a perfect harbor for those who deal with this dilemma everyday.
I admit, being an author of a NY Times best-seller, Pulitzer Award winner or Nobel Price Winner is a mesmerizing dream for me. Especially, when you look at the background which makes it almost impossible. No influential connections, no big friends, no channels to push the narrative make it hard. Medium is a place where I decided to meditate after all. I write my books and publish them elsewhere. I write for my local community in Facebook. But when I want to break free or return to my origins I find refugee in here. It does not require any credentials. It simply wants me to publish my feelings after feelings. Things that jump around my soul rest in this platform. There are drafts that I did not publish yet. I am always editing them and keeping in my story vineyard. There are things that I published without giving a second thought. There are things that I write simply because I want to do so. Every time I type, I celebrate.
6 years later I know for sure. I could do more. I did not do it. I could be more. I did not become it. I could write like never before but somehow I preferred to smile like others into useless cameras. Now, I am recovering into early mode. Attacking every bit of a cake which is in front of me. My eyes get bigger with every paragraph. My heart beats faster than ever. Medium has inspired me to earn writerly money in(Pickvisa)but to always return here, for a quiet and personal space.
May be one day I will be enough for this world.
But now there is still much that I can type about.
