Bye, Bye Medium, A Retrospective (Part 1)
In the late 2010s, my writing often took a back seat to my challenging psychological issues
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 shined like a beacon over the movie theater where I saw the movie. And then, when I saw the movie and experienced the twist —
POP!
“That’s it!” I screamed as the balloon shriveled off into the scuzzy Hollywood gutter of my mind.
Now, the reality is it was a good movie, maybe even a great one according to its 90 out of 100 Metascore. Unfortunately, my great expectation had first overhyped it and then deflated it.
The same thing happened several years later with the Neil Gaiman road trip fantasy novel, American Gods. A friend who knew I loved mythology told me he thought it was the greatest novel ever and he was confident I would agree. Air pump meet balloon, balloon meet toothpick. “A good read” was all it got from me. Again, probably better than that, but it was pumped up to be knocked down below its proper place.
Before 2019, I thought I’d taken these two lessons to heart. I’d say things like “Don’t let your expectations ruin your experience of reality.”
I mostly stopped paying attention to critics before I experienced movies or books and, in a strange twist, if a friend hyped something up, I’d expect it to be worse than they said to protect me from letdown.
It turns out, though, poisonous expectations aren’t solely delivered to us by other people, they can be formed in the deepest cauldron of our Souls.
When I decided to create this blog at the beginning of 2019 and then in December 2019, when I focused solely on it, I really did expect that it would become as successful as many of the very popular writers on Medium. I believe that strongly in my writing.
Now, I take none of the almost 500 followers I have for granted and I’ve cherished getting feedback from many of you. However, it’s a far cry from what I envisioned.
By the late summer of 2020, the reality began to settle in that it wasn’t going to happen as I’d dreamed it, and I now see how the following cycle played out:
I blow up what I think will happen and then, when it doesn’t, I beat myself up for not making it happen. Then, I become cynical about the world and even angry at it for not supporting me. After that, sometimes I soothe the emotional pain of that failure with substances, which make it even harder to get anything done, and this downward spiral only intensifies.
In the end, I must accept it: my Medium blog not taking off is nobody’s fault but mine. My lofty expectations sank it.
That said, it’s not all bad news. As I’ve looked back and read some of the posts I’ve written, well, I think there’s a lot to be proud of and I will share some of those in this series.
Maybe you’ll agree with me that I did some solid, original writing from 2019–2023. And if you do, maybe you’ll be compelled to join me over on my new blog on Substack, which will get started in the fall.
Last, I’m hoping this blog post will help me bring some of my self-destructive patterns into awareness so I become less likely to repeat them going forward, thus hurting the Substack blog and other creative projects I want to do.
You see, after several years of struggle, I finally feel driven by my desire to be the success I know I can be. But to be successful, we have to see clearly how we sometimes stand in our own way.
A Time of Transition
In 2015, I turned 42 and I knew I was in a transitional phase of my life. I’d been teaching English in public schools in Japan for just over 10 years and had just published my first novel that spring. I thought I could return to the life I had in my 20s when I was a professional writer and I could put teaching mostly into the rearview mirror.
In the background of my mind, I’d circled 2020 as the year when I’d really start living this new life. Over those next few years as the world got weirder and darker, I focused a lot on inner transformation, figuring that effort would build some sort of framework for my new life and it would give me topics to write about.
In the last days of December 2017, I heard the call to focus on regular writing, committing to one blog post per week on my WordPress blog. I fulfilled that and, well, it was the best year of writing I’d had since completing the first draft of my novel earlier that decade.
On the other hand, when 2018 came to a close, I was exhausted from those often lengthy, deep-dive weekly blog posts, and, well, from an external reward perspective, I didn’t have much to show for it. My readership had increased only a little, and I hadn’t earned any money for my efforts.
I felt then, and still feel, that articles like this one and this one, and article series like this one and this one are among many that could easily run in professional magazines. They certainly are quality writing from a unique perspective which took many hours to produce, and thus, I’d like to think are worthy of financial compensation.
Why Psychedelics Will Clash With Our Culture of Individualism
Note: This is part three of a three-part post on psychedelics. This week, I'll continue to use Michael Pollan's book…teachersandtrees.wordpress.com
Throughout the 2010s, I felt my goal should be to make more of my money from writing than teaching. Since I first began to write short stories at age 6, people have told me “You are a great writer!” Meanwhile, while I enjoy teaching and have received a lot of positive feedback, teaching has always been more of a job than a calling or a career to me.
It was in this mindset at the start of 2019 that I decided to end the weekly posts on WordPress and transition over to Medium, where I’d heard writers could get their stories seen better than on WordPress and, if one did it well and often enough, they could start making some money at it.
Unfortunately, 2019 was, literally, a crazy year for me and that transition didn’t go as smoothly as I planned.
Everybody Gets A Little Crazy Sometimes, Right?
The 2010s were a decade of increasingly challenging mental health issues for me.
For one thing, throughout my adult life, I’ve struggled with various forms of addiction and these seemed to pick up steam as the 2010s moved on. Secondly, I’ve never gotten an official diagnosis, but I think I’d likely be classified as bipolar II, probably a mild form of it.
I had periods, usually lasting about a week, when I didn’t sleep much, sometimes staying up all night, even a few nights in a row, and during them, I had many great ideas for my writing and life. Those periods were usually enjoyable, like being on MDMA for a week, where my heart felt more open to everyone and the world around me.
I spent most of my time writing long posts on Facebook and reaching out to friends around the world on social media, offering them love and encouragement, which meant when I came down from those upcycles, I didn’t have much concrete to show for them (though I realize that I probably did help a lot of people in those challenging years with my encouragement).
That said, this short story, whose first draft was written in one sleepless 48-hour period, came out of one of those upcycles and I still think it’s a lot of fun, especially if you like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and zany, free-form fictional investigations into criminal justice systems which are often insane.
Free Flea!: A Short Story Starring Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers (Song Spoiler Edition)
The following is a creative work of fiction, my 2018 Christmas gift to my readers. This version is the one where I HAVE…teachersandtrees.wordpress.com
My episodes, which also included debilitating downs of low energy and a feeling of being disconnected from both the world and myself, really began to increase in 2018, and by the summer of 2019 through early 2020, the pattern was almost as consistent as one week up, one week of stabilizing, one week of down, one week of stabilizing, one week of up and then repeat.
During this period, I started this Medium blog. My first post, published in March of 2019, claims that the blog would be “specifically on issues relating to politics and current events.” Why that focus? Well, I have always defined myself as a liberal, but in the early Trump years, I began to question this because I was having increasing trouble relating to my long-time liberal friends.
I Want Bernie For President, But I Want to Promote Tusli Today
I know it seems absurdly early, but for the past several weeks I’ve been thinking about the November 2020 United States…bryanwinchell-japan.medium.com
No, I wasn’t turning conservative; my sense of myself is my core values haven’t changed, but the world around me has. I also feel like while I remembered the lessons of the George W. Bush Years, many of my liberal friends had forgotten, becoming way too generous to US political institutions like its intelligence agencies, mostly because of their anger at Donald Trump and their fear of where the country was going under his presidency.
Some of my growing distance from my friends, though, was a result of my inner growth as well as the impact of living in Japan since 2004, which helps me see the U.S. political landscape from the unique perspective of both a detached outsider and, because I still have many family members and friends in the U.S., a concerned insider.
So I wanted to really focus on these politics and current events, if for no other reason than to figure out why I was feeling more and more out of resonance with so many former political allies.
However, one of the real downsides of too often being in my bipolar upcycle is I make promises I can’t keep and I overextend myself. Then, when I come down, I come so far down that just getting out of bed to take a leak can feel Sisyphean. And part of what makes the down worse is beating myself up for not following through when I was feeling better.
Thus, that March 2019 post was the only thing I posted on Medium; the rest of my writing stayed on WordPress and, unlike 2018, it was infrequent and not consistent.
Teachers, Trees and Thrones!
Personal growth, current events, media reviews and fun!teachersandtrees.wordpress.com
After devoting my writing efforts to covering the final season of Game of Thrones in the spring of 2019, I did have a nice flurry of regular writing that summer, which included this doozy, an article inspired by a frightening lightning experience and my goal to live my life as an adventure rather than being stuck in the cage of comfort and safety.
I certainly was adventurous, at least philosophically, when I pondered the idea that something big actually did change in 2012, asking “Are We Living Through A Phase Shift in Human History?”
Unfortunately, by the fall of 2019, I had trouble staying focused on writing long-form content, as the intensity of my bipolar episodes were really increasing, leading to several extremely powerful psychological experiences and insights into my life and our world. These convinced me I had to quit my English teaching job of 16 years the following spring because I knew something big was coming.
Am I claiming to have predicted COVID-19? No, it wasn’t specific like that. It was just a strong sense that something big was on the horizon, something which would likely impact everyone, and I’d be better off not tied down to a job working for someone else.
These experiences also opened me up to diving deep into studying the cycles of nature through the ancient archetypal language of astrology, which would become a major focus of my learning in the following years, and, eventually, I’d turn that learning into writing.
An Astrological Skeptic Was Helped By Astrology in 2020, Can It Help You in 2023?
Like early 2020, big changes in the heavens are afoot in spring 2023, maybe astrology can help you adapt?bryanwinchell-japan.medium.com
Unfortunately, there was a downside to my “future seeing” and it wasn’t as clear as I thought it was. Looking back, I think my upcycles from 2015–2019 were that air pump, blowing up the balloon of what I’d envisioned 2020 to be, and the down cycles of the first half of 2020 were the toothpick popping it violently, sending me into a late 40s Dark Night of the Soul over the next few years that I’m only now emerging from.
Having said that, working on this retrospective during mid-summer 2023, I’m also wondering if maybe I wasn’t just four years ahead of myself. Maybe my vision of what my life could become in 2020 was me tapping into what I’m going to do in 2024?
Maybe?
In the next post in this series, we’ll look at what I’d hoped to get out of 2020, what resulted, and see if any of it might resonate with where I want to go next.
Thanks for reading! You can support me simply by sharing my stuff, by buying me a coffee, by linking to me on Twitter or Facebook by checking out my old blog, by listening to my podcast, The B&P Realm Podcast, or by reading my 2015 novel, “The Teacher and the Tree Man.” You can also find that book in full here, or broken down into four shorter books (book 1, book 2, book 3 and book 4) or you can listen to it for free.