I Now Have Over 1000 Medium Followers!
It was like every other late winter Dublin morning. The windows dripping condensation like a wet poodle after an unforgettable slow-motion session with the garden-hose. The neighbour banging his car’s door which I can only assume is a creative attempt to wake himself up as he speeds off to drive his taxi for the next eight hours and my alarm clock scaring the bejeezus out of me, kicking off the morning routine much better than my Nespresso machine ever will. It’s groundhog day. Heck. It’s groundhog year at this point. Everything is so much the same that I am working on a YouTube channel to break up the mundane, accepting to be featured on a podcast just to see if there’s anything left in this rinse-and-repeat lockdown life to give me an anxiety attack, and I started eating oranges again.
In that context, opening my Medium app, and seeing that I now had over 1000 followers, compared to the 997 I had the day before, felt like an old ex that dumped you, texting and telling you years later they were horribly wrong. Unexpected, though I knew it could happen, but feels good regardless. Especially because believe it or not, I didn’t even try. My blog was always the one thing I treated with religious Beatles attitude and just “let it be”. I never did it for the followers. I only know maybe 20 or so of you. I never asked anyone to follow me, and I never cared if you did, but you did. I don’t know why, and I most likely will never find out, but I am very grateful that all 1000+ of ye followed me. I never saw my writing as entirely pointless, because I write to express myself in the way I know how, so at the very least it’s therapeutic for me, but the fact that over 1000 of you out there decided to stick around for whatever else my mind blurts out onto the word wide web, in often incredibly long and convoluted sentences such as this one, makes me think my articles — as I like to call them — are perhaps more than just therapeutic for me, they might occasionally be potentially useful to you. I find that inspiring, because…
I am not really a blogger
I post rarely. I think the most was ten articles a year. On average it’s more like five or six a year. I don’t have a niche either. It’s mostly tech related, but there’s other stuff in there too like accessibility, random thoughts, even some philosophical nonsense. I think half my followers don’t even know what to expect to read in my next article, and guess what? I don’t either… 😂 I just like to write. Occasionally. I don’t think I’d like to do it on a daily basis — though I did it for a while when I was a web admin and music critic for a major Romanian website — but only because I was terribly poor and needed the money. Some — sadly — sell their bodies, I sold my thoughts. Both professions age just as poorly believe it or not. Writing for me is ultimately…
A release mechanism
I am an introvert for the most part. There’s more world happening inside my head than outside my head, and to balance things off, at random increments of time, just like mount Etna, I spurt some stuff out to the surface. A lot of folks have asked me about my writing process as if it were something structured. It’s absolutely not. It’s anything but. It usually starts with a random thought that becomes an article heading that I save into Medium. Sometimes those titles get fleshed out over weeks, other times over the course of an hour or two. There are plenty times when those headings stay just that, and never see the light of day. There have been times I wrote two thousand words only to realise they are just an unnecessary deranged rant that I should keep to myself. I have an entire scrapyard of articles. But I keep them, ‘cause who knows, today’s rant, tomorrow’s wisdom. But I digress, and what I am really trying to say is…
Thank you
And I really mean that. Well, I must, I wrote this article, didn’t I? But I do thank you because, you see, you are all highlighting a fundamental reality, a truth that has been an indubitable fact for millennia — there is always someone out there who will listen. Nobody is entirely alone in their thoughts and views, and while that is the reason for many terrible man-made events throughout history, it’s also the reason for the good stuff, the stuff that makes us better, more intelligent, empathic and evolved as a race — even when it doesn’t really feel like we are. Evolving, that is. You might not be a round peg in a square hole, but you may very well be a triangular peg in a round hole. The bottom line is, you’ll fit in somewhere, and your thoughts will matter to someone, and voila, you’re no more entirely alone. It may not be a hug — we all know, those come expensive, if at all these days — but someone, somewhere at some point in time identifies with your thoughts, your expression of who you are and the way you see the world, and in my book, that’s a great start.
Start sharing your thoughts. It might just be a good thing… 😉
