Bye, Bye Medium, A Retrospective (Part 1)
In the late 2010s, my writing often took a back seat to my challenging psychological issues
Note: This is the first in a series, where I’ll look back on my four years on Medium in an attempt to understand where I succeeded and where I failed so that my next blog, which will be on Substack, will be even better. It’s also kind of a “Best of” collection, where I’ll be sharing links to and comments about some of the posts that are my favorites.
Learning the Hard Lesson of Self-Created Lofty Expectations
Lofty expectations are both an air pump and a toothpick to a balloon we mistakenly think is reality.
Sometimes, these are expectations born out of the mouths of others. Those mouths could belong to someone we know, like a friend, or someone we don’t, like a blogger we enjoy reading, or a media story being repeated everywhere.
Travel 20-plus years to the past with me for two examples.
Start in 1992, with the film, The Crying Game, a romantic crime thriller with a delicious twist. I was in college in Los Angeles then and everyone was raving about that twist, inflating the Expectation Balloon until it dwarfed even the ever-present Hollywood sign which…
