Who Are These Heartless Monsters That Leave a Single Clap For a Story?
Probably the same people who go out to eat and don’t tip
On an average day, I wake up around 4:30 or 5 AM. This doesn’t come as difficult to me and I don’t think it makes me a better person than you. I do it because I’ve always done it — and plus it’s a great way of masking my insomnia and overactive brain as ambition.
At any rate, I get up, turn on the coffee and gather my thoughts. I perhaps smoke a bit of pot to make the day a bit more gleeful. Turns out it’s great for combating things like a depression so dark, there are days you have to forge reasons to get out of bed. So judge if you must — IDGAF.
I’m a writer, so I wake up and write. I have to go sand, prime and paint a basement in an hour and fifty-two minutes — but I do this first under the crazy pretentious hope I one day may not have to and can stay home and write.
I am not an aspiring writer, it is not a hobby, it’s who I am. I’ve written regularly from the time I was twelve years old, that was twenty years ago. While I haven’t logged them, it’s a safe bet to say I put in my ten thousand hours. While I may not have yet achieved mastery, I deserve more than a single clap from you applause pinching misers.
What I interpret your single clap for my story to mean is “Fuck you, your mother and everything you stand for. Fuck your story — as a staff, record label and as a motherfucking crew”. Please don’t go full ‘Hit Em Up’ on my story.
I may be no R.L. Stine but I can tell a story. I may be no Gary Vaynerchuk but I can tell you a thing or two about business. While you should probably never take relationship advice from me — I’ve learned much about them from being incredibly and shockingly bad at them. And I publish all of this, usually before you’re awake. I’m not asking for a fucking Pulitzer here — just more than a single, solitary and lonely clap.
There was a time, you could only clap once for a story.
Well, folks welcome to the future. It’s 2019 and we can clap a full fifty times for stories. Many folks here, depend on those claps to be able to afford coffee onext pay period— as it’s how we earn money for providing you with reading material, day after day, week after week and month after month.
I’ve been writing here regularly on Medium myself for three years now and many folks have been here longer than I have. Whether you consider writing a skill or not — though I’m not really sure what you’re doing here if you don’t — we work really hard. And yes, I said work because this is very much work.
I do it before I go to work — and then some more when I come home from work. I’m 32 and not married and it probably has something to do with the fact I’m more dedicated to this here craft than I ever have been to my own romantic interests. I’d rather edit and brainstorm than go on bad first dates and browse Tinder.
These are choices I’ve made consciously, sacrifices I’ve made willingly. While I’m not asking for a pat on the back — or anything else from you — what I am asking is if you’ve truly enjoyed my or anyone else’s story here on this platform, please be so kind as to clap more than once.
I feel like it takes more of an effort to only clap a single time than to leave a reasonable and uninsulting number of them. So in turn, you’ll be making your own life easier. If you won’t do it for me, do it for yourself.
If you are a writer here, especially one in the paid partner program — and you have the audacity to leave only one clap on any story you read all the way through and don’t hate with a passion — you are an offender of the worst kind. I don’t know what your parents did to you as a kid or how many hugs you missed but please stop taking the hate in your heart out on the rest of us.
Seriously though, there’s something degrading about leaving a single clap for a story. If you actively know how this platform operates and are still inclined to leave only one clap for my story, I’d rather you just didn’t. It’ll help restore my faith in humanity and stop me from judging you as a miserable person who hates their entire bleak existence and wants to ruin literature as we know it.
“But A lot of Truth is Said in Jest” — Eminem, and also a bunch of people before him, I think