The most important thing I learned writing a daily post on Medium for 6 months: I remain Billy no-mates
On the 1st of June this year I published the first of what I planned to be daily posts on Medium. I hoped to make it to a year of posts. Neither my motivation nor my goals were particularly clear but I suspected, at the very least, I may find out something about myself.
Six months on, I have attracted a handful of new followers, a handful of comments, and a handful of referred posts. Compared to the bugle-blazing articles that proclaim ‘How I reached 300,000 followers and had 40,000 posts referred each day in just six weeks of writing daily’, I feel I may have underachieved.
And yet.
I have learned this: I write for myself. Which may be just as well.
I fail to craft smart headlines which attract readers by the hundred. My pieces are too discursive and often too abstract, so they are rarely finished by any reader who stumbles across one. My politics can be strident.
But the me on the page is getting closer to the me off the page and that, I feel, is a victory of sorts. Put it another way; when I write, I no longer feel such a vast distance between my intentions and the written outcome. That has to be progress, right?
I take consolation — a little tongue in cheek — from a couple of sentences John Berger wrote about his recently dead friend Sven, who was a painter:
Others disapproved of him because he devoted his life to art, and they could see he was not a genius. For them, the nobility of that persistence passed unnoticed. From Confabulations, page 54
Here’s to the next six months.
