Celebrating My Top Nine Pieces of 2020!

With more of a backstory behind a lot of them!

Hi, I’m Lucy, and I love eggs. I started writing on Medium mid-pandemic, after watching Shelby Church’s youtube video reviewing her experiences as a writer on this platform.

I thought, earn money for writing down all the thoughts I’ve been thinking in my weird brain noodle? I’m down.

Along this way, I’ve realized that a lot more people enjoyed these noodles than I ever thought. So for that, thank you for egg-sisting. You, my dear reader, are a soft-boiled egg of delicious and pure wholesomness.

My Top Nine Pieces Of The Year

I’m jumping on the bandwagon of celebrating my top ten pieces of the year! I’ve read quite a number of pieces from certain writers on how annoying and useless these pieces are, and I truly disagree.

I refuse to be part of a hamster wheel of writing productivity, defining success only by what others deem as valuable. Sure, readers’ opinions are vital to shaping what I write to some degree, but there is also an element of making sure I write the stories and amplify the voices that a lot of people try to ignore in passivity.

There’s also celebrating milestones and steps, knowing that writing is a long journey of mistakes and barriers and learning and growing along with your audience. A genuine engaged audience understands that writers are not perfect because writers are human, supports us for where we are and challenges us to do better.

This has been especially true for an audience of readers who are also writers themselves, which makes the Medium community especially valuable and supportive as a community.

Have I thanked you guys a million times yet? Because I don’t think it’s enough — thank you for existing.

Thank you for walking alongside my imperfect writing skills and cheering me on.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and stories, ones that I could see myself in. I felt less lonely through your words despite living a year that’s been more physically isolating than before.

Thank you.

[1] Save Time and Money with the Magic of Fried Rice

I really need to thank Aimée Gramblin for prompting this piece. She’s been such an encouraging editor of Age of Empathy, pushing me further as a writer in terms of experiential storytelling.

I saw in her words and pieces how writers don’t actually have to “niche down”, and that in writing about the things that genuinely interest us (which apparently for me, is passionately writing about fried rice) can be just as successful.

I ended up raving about fried rice for many words, discussing the trials and tribulations of reaching the perfect recipe to realize — there actually isn’t a perfect recipe for fried rice. That’s why it’s beautiful.

[2] Why I ended my Talkspace online therapy subscription

This piece focusses on my experiences in seeking mental health, and ended up being the first piece that got curated on Medium. It was “baby’s first curation dopamine hit”, as I like to joke.

Jokes aside though, it was empowering to finally put into words all the frustration I had in finally getting a therapist that fit with me. As I write this I still feel guilty about this, afraid that people read this and just think that I was being picky and ungrateful for the services that I WAS able to access. Having the money/ insurance to access mental health is still not something readily available to a lot and having that alone meant I was fortunate.

But you would absolutely not believe how hard it is to seek mental health support that isn’t laced with racism, and this review is one puzzle piece of a bigger journey I took.

[3] Community (a handwritten poem!)

The next viral piece of the year is one published in Suntonu Bhadra’s Paper Poetry, which focusses on handwritten poems.

Poetry is one component of my self-care, being able to express myself through the artistry of words. Paper Poetry is the next level, upgraded, first-class version of this self-care, where I can to doodle and handwrite my ideas on paper. (and finally use my set of coloured pens and markers).

In this particular poem, I celebrated community yet again — which honestly seems like an emergent theme of 2020.

[4] The One Real Way to Earn Money Quick

Subtitle: and one real way to lose all of it quick.

So yeah, this one has a clickbaity title, but I’d like to say that the clickbaiti-ness is a literary device of its own. The clickbait title sets a tone the way you click into any clickbaity article and read the same exact clickbaity message and say to yourself, wow, I fell for clickbait again.

That’s the context I wanted to set, to then be juxtaposed with my actual passionate PSA on how these clickbaity articles and financial scams prey on scarcity and fear.

They specifically work well with people who have absolutely nothing already and are desperate, which makes my passionate hatred for scams of this sort burn an even hotter red (or white, if you must be accurate).

I was something like several days into marathoning coffeezilla’s youtube channel, someone who exposes these scams, and this poem was one way of getting this message off my chest.

[5] The Adventures of Baking a Chocolate-Mayonnaise Cake

The short origin story of this article is that I mistakenly bought 1L of mayonnaise, and realized that it would take me a lifetime to finish mayo if I only ever used it in egg sandwiches and egg salads.

Mayo does not last a lifetime.

I took to Twitter to ask for suggestions and no fewer than three people told me that mayonnaise could be a substitute for eggs in baking recipes??? Theoretically this makes sense, simply because mayo is just … egg and oil whipped together into a suspension, and baked goods comprise of egg and oil in … different mixtures.

But could mayo-filled cakes actually taste good?

I experimented and wrote up a lab report:

And somehow, it got curated under “food”. I am perhaps still yelling about this.

[6] Zombie Kid

This haiku is a part of an October/ Fall / Halloween challenge I took, with prompts by hollystwpoetry, an amazing poet who sells typewritten poems. (If you need a gift for a friend’s upcoming birthday, highly recommend this as a potential gift idea!)

The poem itself was in response to the prompt monsters, and related to a central storybook narrative in the kdrama It’s Okay to Not Be Okay. In these children storybooks there were stories that on the surface seemed gruesome and scary, but told stories of real life lessons that we often don’t reflect on because they’re even scarier.

I had SO MUCH FUN with this monthly challenge and hope to build one of my own … sometime in the future!

[7] Blankets

This was a haiku about… blankets, but I think in these words about how blankets are the kind of pseudo-human warmth we’re getting in physical distancing — really reached and resonated a lot of folks.

If this is you, my heart is reaching out, and may we as humanity finally band together and pull through so that these distancing measures can be something of the past.

[8] 4 Reasons Why I Like BetterHelp Online Therapy so far

This is part 2 of what I promised was a series on my journey in accessing mental health care! It has a decidedly more positive tone as I finally really did find comfort in this new platform.

There are some barriers happened that did happen shortly after I published this (spoilers for an upcoming part 3 to this series?), but I like that I was able to stop and reflect early in the process and find value in some of the pieces available to me.

I hope sharing my story might encourage others to focus on their mental health!

[9] The bathroom at my first scientific conference

This is one of my personal all-time favourites, so I’m so glad this made top nine of yours too!

This is a micropoem about an experience I had at my first scientific conference that truly changed my perspective. While I was bustling about, frustrated about long bathroom lines and anxious about missing the next talk, someone else was celebrating that there was a line to the women’s bathroom.

Something that for the longest time this person didn’t have to deal with because most scientists who attended the conference were male.

Lucy (The Eggcademic) [she/her] wants to thank everyone who has been on this journey with her! It’s been such a splendid, supportive, fun, amazing journey, and just what she needed to continue a long-abandoned hobby of writing. ❤

🐰🌌 Bookmark & read these pieces by me and Ono Mergen