My Medium Love

I have been on this platform as a writer since 2017 and seen publications leave, algorithms shift, writers blossom, and companies birth platforms. It has been interesting to say the least considering I was an early, doubtful adopter. From being a top writer in Love and Advice in 2018 to completely abandoning my status to focus on poetry in 2020, I have not hacked the algorithm so if that is why you are reading, please stop.

Medium for me represents humility, community, and a place for perspective. In fact, my five year relationship was born alongside my career on these white pages of the internet.

To be honest, I would never have started a Medium profile if it wasn’t for this techy-dude I went on a date with in October of 2017. He suggested that I ditch my blog and move to Medium to get more eyes on my words. I laughed at the time thinking that he was a know-it-all. I fell in love with him shortly after. Two weeks later I started with a story about moving meditation…and the observation of my body in connection to my thoughts. He shared my article on Facebook at the time and I virtually blushed. It was the first time someone other than my parents had shared anything I worked on.

I went on to write stories. Stories about him, about me, about a life I wanted for us. As our relationship grew, I wrote advice columns of all the things we struggled with like open relationship discussions, long-distance nuances, love languages, how to manage conflict, and the story of us cohabitating. I wrote about love because I was trying to understand it. I still am.

In 2020, the love between us simply came crashing down. Infidelity, conflict, social media…you name it, we struggled. Oh and COVID happened, which in hindsight probably saved our relationship because it forced us to sit down and really do the work together. I remember opening my laptop to write anything and coming to an upsetting realization: My writing was entirely about our love. I became an imposter giving advice about love in one fell swoop.

Time continued to pass as it often does, and we healed. We went to therapy, talked through unhealed elements of our relationship, and learned to fight fair. I moved from writing advice to pouring my heart out in dark, sweet poems about pain and anger. I sipped wine on our couch, trying not to replay the horrible things I knew to be true. Our story had a second layer that I could not bring myself to admit on Medium. I felt like a fraud for even writing about love. My time as a writer in my mind, collapsed.

I continue to read and write poetry. I crave the dark, sweet words and all of the simplistic beauty in how it’s crafted. Poetry has become an art form to me in this experience and I guess love has too. I continue to love Medium techy-dude after all our ups and downs, twists and turns. I’ve watched him in time grow and mature, becoming more vulnerable, dedicated and generous. To be honest, I started writing about in 2017 and I think now I look at Medium as an archive of the chaos, a depiction of naivety.

But I am grateful nonetheless.

It is not often you birth an entire writing career from one muse. Rarely, does one forge a second income overnight on love and advice columns. Even less often, will a writer find themselves publicly hating the characters they built on the internet.

More often than not, real people, face love and pain simultaneously. On Medium, I am not unique, but a Medium writer crafting words about my Medium love.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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