A Letter to Medium Writers

Keep writing from your corner of the world

There’s a painting on the wall in my Nana’s house that always made me feel calm when I was a kid. I’d stand in her living room while soft light filtered in through the blinds, listening to her and my Papa talk while looking at the painting and a floating, peaceful serenity would wash over me.

I haven’t seen that painting in a long time, but I’ve found that a stranger’s words can wrap me up in the kind of warmth and comfort I felt when I looked at it. Sometimes your words, Medium writers, remind me of who I am better than I can remind myself.

I like a good success story as much as the next person. I like to read about someone overcoming obstacles. But here on Medium, we get to see people at all stages of writing, growth, and vulnerability — not just the “success story” stage. That feels more essential. More real. It reminds me that it’s not about what we accomplish, but about who we are and who we become.

My writing usually takes itself way too seriously so this time I just want to be plain: you all inspire the hell out of me.

I just binge-read someone’s articles last night for hours, appalled that they aren’t more well-known and hoping they continue sharing their writing forever. Someone else’s article mentioned they were riding the high of their very first curation and it brought the biggest smile to my face.

I’m inspired by all of you who don’t pander — I see you here doing your thing, writing your words and stories and poetry over and over and over because it’s yours. You write it in the way it belongs to you.

It’s exhausting to dredge up everything from your soul and try to explain it, try to make words do what you want them to do. You’re digging up what you can and spilling it out in wrong words and right words, slamming it into the keyboard and hoping it means something to someone, and I just want to be the one to say that it does. It does mean something to someone.

In a world inundated with resumes and checklists of accomplishments, it seems like we always need to be hard. We need to have grit, determination, and resilience to “make it.” But on here, even when the world doesn’t seem to be offering what we thought we’d get — love, peace, hope, happiness, adventure — we remind each other where we’ve found it. We remind each other of the unlikely places and people where our dreams were found, and we remind each other to hang on to all of it.

Tell me your comeback story, when the bottom fell out and you had nowhere to go but up. Remind me of those sublime moments when you were falling in love, when the realization hit you that this person was nothing and nobody to you and now you’re wondering how you could have ever been living before you knew them. Or just write about what it was like waking up next to friends near mountains shrouded in mist.

It’s your stories, not your writing, that I’m most inspired by. Because we’re so much more than words on a page, aren’t we? We’re everything we do out there in the world.

It’s the spectrum of all of us, together, writing our stories and trying desperately to capture life, that reminds us of who we are. So keep writing from your corner of the world, because it’s reaching mine and changing everything.

Whoever you all are, whatever you do by day and night and whatever it is that brings you back here to pour it out, I’m inspired by you.

I wish I could know all of you. I’ll settle for drinking up your stories.