Let Go Of the Quest to Go Viral

Once I stopped trying so hard to find readers on Medium, I found readers on Medium

I wrote a story a few weeks ago. I hadn’t written in months because the first half of 2021 decided to troll me, serving up the following: My dog died after a tortuous week at the hospital; my dad, who is having a grand time in his assisted living facility, told me I couldn’t move my mom (who recently had a stroke) into the same place because seeing her would “interfere with my own healing” (yes, they are still married); I got a medical diagnosis the neurologist described as “truly fascinating because it’s one in a million” adding “you’re not even in a textbook!” I’m not going to bother explaining the hot guy from Colorado, who turned out to be in a cult.

When I realized 2021 was having its way with me, I did what any sane person would do: crawled into bed. I stopped doing things, including writing. With my luck, I felt like even driving to the grocery store meant someone would land on my windshield unexpectedly. My operating principle was no sudden movements.

But one day, I peeked out from under the covers and decided to go paddleboarding. And that was great. And so I posted a photo of me sitting on a paddleboard to Instagram. And the reaction to that photo was not so great. In a word, people commented on my body in a way that made me cry. I didn’t really know how to process that, so for the first time in months, I sat down and wrote a story about it.

The story is about my boobs; specifically, it’s about people’s reactions to the fact that I have big boobs. The story included a photo of me, which of course, included my boobs. Because my boobs are part of me.

When the story came out, I had been writing on Medium for about a year and a half. (That is, if you count 2020 as one year as opposed to multiple lifetimes). I’m not quite sure why I started writing other than there was an itch I wanted to scratch. I write a lot for my regular job, and I like the flow-feeling (that’s the technical term) writing gives me. I wanted to feel that flow-feeling about subjects other than the law. I wanted to write about food and love and being depressed and how much I hate the self-help industry.

If you measure success on Medium based on views, reads, and reading ratio, before the boob story, I never had much luck. While my reading ratio has always been pretty solid, my views were dismal. In an effort to “improve,” I fell into a trap of chasing the algorithm and wrote stories I wasn’t proud of—stories that promised an answer to life’s big questions even though I have no idea what I’m talking about. I thought the algorithm would like those. Unsurprisingly, this did not improve my writing. Then I fell into another trap: reading other people’s stories about how successful they were on Medium. This also did not improve my writing.

Enter the boob story. It took off like a rocket. And it just kept taking off, and then it was published in Human Parts, and it was like it took off all over again. Without getting into exact numbers, the boob story has about one-gajillion times the views than any other story I’ve ever written.

I was thrilled, obviously. I was happy about the money, but I was also happy that my other stories might get some views. The boob story is good in that it’s honest and raw, but it was written in a huff, and I don’t think it’s necessarily my best. I waited for people to discover my other stories. But instead, the boob story kept taking off, and the other stories sorta stayed the same.

Curious, I took a look at the readers’ interests for the boob story. I expected things like feminism, self, psychology, body positivity. What I found: technology, science, programming, psychology, artificial intelligence, and business.

I have a theory about what this means, but let me seek forgiveness in advance because I’m about to make one of those sweeping generalizations that people have (rightly) started to reject: My boob story was going viral because men were drawn to the photo of my boobs. Of course, women can also be interested in these subjects. But I’m pretty confident my theory makes sense—the boob story is being propelled by the photo rather than the writing.

This made me sad. Don’t get me wrong: I love men, I love men who love boobs. I am “sex-positive” as the kids say these days, and I have no problem in achieving success — in any form — because of sex and sexuality. But it made me sad anyway because I realized that if my theory is correct, I’ll never be able to recreate this kind of viral moment. I can’t post a photo of my boobs on every story.

But then I started to get emails. I got emails from all over the world, from all sorts of people. They told me the boob story resonated with them because they too had endured comments about some aspect of themselves that other people had deemed weird or out of bounds: being too hairy, having a speech impediment, being overweight, being underweight—you name it, they had endured some sort of cruelty about an aspect of themselves they had no control over.

I wrote them back and asked each of them the same question: Are you saying that people say cruel things to you directly about your hairiness/speech impediment/weight? I was curious because in a way, I thought what I described in the boob story, having so-called friends say unkind things about a body part I couldn’t control, was reserved for boobs. My theory was that boobs occupied a special place in society such that they were the last fair game for commentary. But I was wrong. Everyone wrote back with a version of the same answer: Yes, I have endured this my whole life.

And so I was sad again. Not because I would never recreate the success of the boob story but because now there’s an alternative theory: My boob story went viral because we have all been subject to cruelty at the hands of our friends and family. This may seem obvious; the world is a messy place, and we are increasingly less gentle with one another. I’ve been told before that I’m naive to think the world is any other way.

But for me it was a reminder: Do not chase algorithms. Do not read articles on how to “make it” on Medium. Do not create headlines that scare the living daylights out of people so they click on them, searching for some elusive answer to life’s unanswerable questions.

Instead, write a story in a huff while you’re crying. Crawl back under the sheets and workshop the story with your dog. Chase the flow-feeling. Be naive.