My Story Got Boosted Before I Had 100 Followers

It’s nice to know you don’t need to offer your firstborn to the Medium gods to get boosted.

I told my 14-year-old daughter I got boosted and she laughed.

“Sure mom,” she said, looking back at her phone, “looks like the thieves realized their mistake pretty quick. Did they drop you back off or did you have to walk home?”

“Hey, I used to be pretty cool,” I smiled. “You don’t think your old mom’s boost worthy?”

It’s my own fault. My kids have been subjected to my playful sarcasm and dry sense of humor all their lives and to survive any extended family gathering they’ve had to wield a quick tongue and thick skin.

They’re also pretty up on the slang, which is why my daughter automatically assumed boosted meant stolen and she was utterly unimpressed.

I’ve been writing on Medium for a month and a half. I was not expecting to get boosted and spent yesterday convinced my son in a dystopian future had sent a nude Arnold Schwarzenegger back to my time to mess with my stats. That scenario would have been cool, but somewhat disappointing. I was a Michael Biehn gal (you know, the OG “Come with me if you want to live” guy in the first Terminator movie) and invested many hours fantasizing about how he’d choose me if just knew me.

I figured if my son was in fact trying to reach me from the future, he’d probably have sent me an email. Email wasn’t a thing in the 80s, so I couldn’t rely completely on the movie for intel.

The email address I set up specifically for Medium is not accessible from my phone. This was deliberate to keep myself from checking it compulsively. And, although I do have the app on my phone because I enjoy reading the stories while I’m waiting in line (or at a red light) or “watching” my kids at another parkour class, I have notifications off.

Sitting down with my computer is a luxury for me, and it wasn’t until after making, serving and cleaning up dinner (for human and non-human family) that I was able to check my email.

There it was. The subject line made it clear before I opened it. Congratulations! Your story has been boosted on Medium.

And any disappointment I might have felt at discovering I wasn’t going to get a shot at saving the world with Michael Biehn from Medium statistic-boosting robots was gone.

Aside from my daughter, you are the only ones I am sharing this with. Writing on Medium is a secret pleasure of mine. No one in my life knows that I am here and I plan to keep it that way. There’s a lot more freedom when you can write without any fallout in real life. Having to reassure someone close to you that they are misinterpreting what you wrote in your journal after they confront you with photocopies of your diary has persuaded me to keep my mouth shut, at least, in real life.

Here, I get to be real, and I am having so much fun writing and reading and just being part of a community of writers. I know I’m late to the game, as usual. I’ll consider it fashionably late. And I realize there are a lot of people complaining that Medium isn’t what it used to be. When I was looking up what it means to get boosted, I found one post lamenting how unfair the new boost feature was going to be.

The author complained that in order to get boosted, you’d have to be friends with Medium brass or at least have a sex tape with a Medium exec leaked (ok I added that sex tape part but it did wonders for the Kardashian girl with the butt so you never know).

I read that article after being boosted so it struck me. I can guarantee you don’t have to sleep with any Medium nerds to get boosted. I’m a Medium newbie. I know no one. And the sex tape I tried to leak of me and my hairy husband got mistaken for footage of a remake of Gorillas in the Mist and didn’t make the impact I had hoped for. I didn’t even have 100 followers when I got boosted. I do now.

I applied for the partnership program today and will be more than thrilled if I can make a little money here. I didn’t go into this with any expectation other than getting my writing fix and reading awesome stories. I like to think I’ve been around enough to be semi-immune to all the shiny promises of fame and fortune peddled on the internet.

To be completely honest, I’m not keeping writing here a secret just so I don’t have to deal with my worlds colliding, it’s also because sitting at my computer to write is frowned upon by hyper-get-shit-done family members who act like I’m wasting time when I could be making money or cleaning the house.

So I steal bits and pieces of time to write in between homeschooling three kids, two of whom have severe dyslexia, caring for a zoo of rescue animals, one of which is an elderly opossum, keeping the house from rivaling Skid Row for the Best Place to Raise a Family awarded by Rat Fancy Magazine and getting in a couple hours of doing deliveries for DoorDash every day.

Don’t get me wrong. All of those things are labors of love, and I don’t even mind working for DoorDash. It might be my all-time favorite job. Considering I’ve done everything from ostrich ranch assistant to bartender to newspaper reporter and a lot more in between, that says a lot. But please God do not make me work in an office.

I die a little every hour I’m forced to sit inside under the tyranny of florescent lighting behind a desk staring at a computer screen. The reporter job was great when I was out covering cool events like when our Governator (fully clothed) emceed the grand reopening of Griffith Observatory back in 2006, but coffee wasn’t a strong enough drug to make sitting in the arctic air-conditioned office tolerable when I knew the sun was shining outside.

So making money writing would mean people might actually leave me alone so I can write. Seems like the second I sneak on my computer my house transforms into the final battle of humans vs. machines. Humans being just me and machines being everyone else in my house who has a cat on their lap so can’t get up to get a drink of water or who rode their bike into the cactus again and needs to be held down while I tweeze hundreds of cactus needles out of his skin. And even though torturing my kids is my favorite hobby, I do need some time to write.

I’ve been interrupted for days at a time while writing this. But I’m not mad. I’m not even frustrated. I am so blessed to have the life that I have with my family that I am actually grateful for the problems I have. They could be so much worse.

Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day. I know a very successful author who writes 12 to 16 hours a day and has her kid in daycare most of those hours. For her, success is making a lot of money and being a well-known author. But for me, a person whose own mother was seldom around because she had to work three jobs, squeezing every bit of time out of the short window I have with my kids is success.

I come across an army of articles on Medium promising that the secret of productivity is a coffee enema and a blow job before breakfast, or sharing the formula for how to write 2,000 articles a day eating Keto. The funny thing about these articles is reading them is the exact opposite of what you need to be doing to get your writing done. The only people reading them are procrastinators reading to procrastinate. I mean no disrespect. I’m queen procrastinator. But the truth is we all know exactly how to get shit done. Just sit the fuck down and do it.

I’ve often said a little bit of success is the best motivation. So I’ll probably add a few extra alarm times to my so-far ignored early morning call to arms. I do love sleep. Again, it’s all a matter of choosing what to do with those hours. But don’t be too hard on yourself. The race to get ahead is just an illusion. There is no getting ahead. We will all end up in the same place sooner or later.

Getting boosted was really cool. But I’m trying to keep the fantasies of making millions on Medium writing by the pool as Michael Biehn rubs my feet to a minimum… umm, I mean my husband rubs my feet. I actually don’t care who does it. I’d just like a foot rub. Maybe getting boosted will mean I can pay for one. Or maybe I’ll just torture my smart-mouth daughter and make her do it.

Write on friends!