What The F*ck Am I Even Still Doing Here?
A self-imposed inquisition
There are very few topics I couldn’t pump out a minimum of 500 words about. This is because I am a writer. It’s all I know, the only thing that comes 100 percent natural to me, that I’m better at than the majority of people I know and meet.
But there’s a lot I don’t and won’t write about. For example, not one time in my entire writing career — and it is a career being I’m a paid professional — have I ever written about what was trending, just for the sake of doing so. I’ve never catered or pandered. Not to a reader and not to an editor. Perhaps it was to my detriment. Maybe I’d have been better off rocking the boat less than I have over the last three years here.
Because call me paranoid if you want but I have an exponential number of followers than I did when I was first starting — yet somehow my engagement, readership, and earnings have all completely nosedived since then. I won’t speculate as to why that is or how it’s even numerically possible, I’ll let each of the very few people this will probably reach decide for themselves.
I’ll be honest, I’ve given you all my very best. I’m tired of bleeding openly here without a just cause for doing so. I don’t know what else I could possibly give you all, that I haven’t already offered up freely, time and time again.
They can say what they want about me when I’m gone, but I left it all on the floor. I never pulled a single punch, but maybe that’s my problem.
I browse the headlines in my news feed and shake my head in disbelief, what happened here? I don’t even belong here as a reader anymore. This place has become a platform full of sanctimonious virtue signaling by white males who feel the need to apologize for being white males, and a diverse crowd of writers who Medium pushes to the point of ad nauseam, as long as they produce article after article reiterating how horrible both whites and males are. Half of it’s disingenuine and the rest of it lacks self-awareness.
This platform and it’s higher-ups care more about their agenda, narrative, and politics than they do about talent or quality content. It is the furthest thing from an unbiased media outlet there could be.
Every time changes are made to how income is earned by writers — it has been to our peril. Medium continues to grow both its readership and bottom line while kicking less and less of it back to the people who are responsible for its very growth.
They have an underpaid militia of literary indentured servants made up of thousands of writers who pump out story after story for literal pennies, while they send over ten thousand dollars a month to their trained circus acts who push their narrative and politics. It has become nothing more than a story sweatshop, where workers are struck for speaking up or voicing their opinions.
It does all this while having the audacity to fraudulently denounce inequality and discrimination, without ever seeing the irony or hypocrisy in it all.
I’m not even angry about it anymore — I’m saddened and disappointed and perhaps equally disgusted. I once had so many hopes tied up in this place and they’ve become all but distant memories I can’t help but mourn as they fade off into the horizon.
The only thing keeping me here at this point is my passion for writing and my dedication to both the readers and writers of the publication I started, Journal of Journeys.
It has grown into a budding little community of readers and writers and I’ll be damned if I’m going to walk away now.
All I can do is keep writing, editing, and publishing with conviction and without hesitation or expectations — so that’s what I’ll be here doing.
Every time I feel ignored, overlooked, or slighted, all it does is serve as fuel for me to keep going until they have no choice but to acknowledge me. It is the chip on my shoulder that keeps me pushing forward.
