Bye, Bye Medium, A Retrospective (Part 2)
2020, The Year My Blog Was Most Active, The Year I Gave Up On It
2020, The Year My Blog Was Most Active, The Year I Gave Up On It
Note: This is the second 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. You can read part one here. In it, I cover what led me to Medium and some of my mental health challenges.
My 2020 Vision
I entered 2020 on a mission. I was going to become a professional content creator, pushing English teaching, which I’d done for the previous 15 years in Japan, mostly to the side.
To accomplish that mission, I had three projects.
First, I was going to transition from WordPress completely, fully committing to Medium. In early 2020, I took an online class created by a popular Medium writer and because of my belief in myself and what I learned, I thought I’d be able to make a good portion of my living off this blog.
Second, after pondering the idea of starting a podcast for several years, I was going to start a podcast that would, by year’s end, take over Rogan and cause Neil Young to hunt me down and kill me. Ha ha — a writer must exaggerate sometimes.
In all seriousness, since 2006 I’d been listening to podcasts, often 2–3 hours per day, and felt I knew enough about what makes a good one that I could make my own which, after it got going, could be monetized.
And last, I was going to write a book. I had this whole big plan to take a cross-country trip in the US from early April to the end of August, mostly by train and never alone by car, in the hopes that I’d meet lots of different people, using both my gregarious personality and journalism skills to talk to them about where they felt America was in 2020.
My book was going to be a travelogue in the spirit of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, which he wrote about a 1960 road trip before another consequential US election.
Like me, Steinbeck had lived overseas for a while, giving us a unique perspective on our native country, like a fish out of water. After living abroad for many years, an expat returns to a country that is no longer familiar and notices things that the locals take for granted. At the same time, the culture of the country still runs through his blood and its vision of what a country can be still remains in his mind.
I did a lot of work to prepare for this trip and I risked a lot, too. The biggest risk was its impact on my marriage. My relationship with my wife had been growing increasingly cold in the latter half of the 2010s, and she wasn’t pleased with my decision to quit work. Still, she said, “I know I can’t stop you,” which I twisted into a stamp of approval.
And then, in March 2020, well, you know what happened then. Whatever the fuck the thing known as COVID-19 was and the global reaction to it happened.
I postponed my trip to the US and like a lot of people, that March and the following months made 2020 a much different year than I’d thought it was going to be.
Flash Back: The Start of This Blog, In Earnest
Over the past few weeks to prepare for this article, I’ve gone back and looked at every article I wrote in 2020. I read most of them all the way through while checking the stats to see if I could better understand which ones worked and which didn’t.
After all of that, I don’t feel any clearer about how Medium articles get eyeballs, and this lack of clarity is one of the reasons I’m leaving Medium for Substack.
Having said that, despite this blog not catching on as I’d hoped it would, I was very pleased to see that in a year when so much of the online dialogue was divisive, judgmental, and hateful, my articles had a big heart, frequently seeking to inspire with creativity and humor, while doing this through various writing mediums, from poetry to personal essays to satirical fiction to political punditry.
Sometimes I find myself frustrated that content creators like me who make a concerted effort to put positive messages into their work don’t seem to get the support from our A.I. Overlords that content creators who add more negativity seem to. In my darker moments, I wonder if this is not intentional.
Unfortunately, when I look back on how the frequency of my posts dropped rapidly after March and then came to a halt in August, I know I let this frustration get the better of me.
Having said that, I’d like to use the rest of this retrospective to tell the rest of my 2020 story and share some of my favorite posts that still managed to make it past the publish button.
Spring 2020 Posts: Wrapping Up the Presidential Politics Posts, Covering COVID-19 from Japan
With my planned trip to the US postponed from April to July, I focused most of my content creation this spring on finishing my plan to publish two podcast episodes per week, reading two chapters of my 80-chapter novel for the latter half of the show, and putting out what I still feel is a very quality podcast, covering a wide range of topics in a unique, fun way.
The B&P Realm * A podcast on Spotify for Podcasters
The B&P Realm is a broad-minded, wide-ranging podcast covering, among other things, personal growth, current…podcasters.spotify.com
In mid March, I made one last effort, using both humor and what I felt was Joe Biden’s lousy political track record, to convince Americans to “get real really quick to avoid the worst presidential race ever,” but soon enough my coverage of the presidential race dried up and I began to experiment, covering a Trump press briefer, arguing that China wouldn’t become the next superpower and making the case that companies which block content creators from sharing the art of their clients aren’t making a smart business decision in the interconnected Information Age.
Why Blocking Art Is Bad Business
YouTubers are increasingly having their videos blocked or de-monetized for shady, outdated reasonsbryanwinchell-japan.medium.com
In addition, twice I provided a perspective on what the COVID-19 crisis was like over here in Japan, the first time in early March 2020 when I made the case to “be Stoic, not to panic, focus on your health and love each other,” while, I believe, essentially getting the COVID-19 crisis right when I wrote that “I am just concerned that the panic may actually cause more problems than the pandemic itself.”
In the second update, written during the annual early May Golden Week, I provided some good journalistic coverage of the first two months of COVID-19 in Japan and insights about why the Japanese experience of COVID was different from other countries, writing the following:
“Japan is not under a strict lockdown like many other countries. Because Japan is a very homogeneous, ancient culture, it relies less on the rule of law and more on peer pressure to enforce decisions made by leadership”.
However, I can also see in this one that my steam for writing this blog regularly was running out, making a promise to keep up these bi-monthly updates that I wouldn’t keep.
Golden Week In Japan Ain’t So Golden in 2020
An Update of Life in the Land of the Rising Sun After Two Full Months in the Coronavirus Erabryanwinchell-japan.medium.com
By June, shocked by the murder of George Floyd and inspired by the protests in my native Pacific Northwest in cities like Seattle and Portland, I wrote a series of articles on the problems with the American justice system. However, judging by how few readers these stories reached and how much money Medium gave me, I have to wonder if my attempt to transcend the narrative of “it’s only bad white cops against black people” by reminding Americans that the issue is Systemic caused Medium to shadow ban my stories.
Again, I don’t know, but these concerns are real for me. After all, I am a Leftist raised on the likes of Chomsky so I have long understood that corporate media outlets create acceptable narratives for journalists to tell. In the 21st century, sites such as Medium can appear to be outside of these traditional systems of control by allowing anyone to publish on them, but, well, as we’ll find out in my upcoming parts 3 and parts 4 of this retrospective, Medium also has methods to keep the cultural conversation inside an Overton Window.
Summer Posts: Shadow Projecting, Poetry, And Calls for Laughter and Love
Sometimes I wonder: perhaps my media would have gotten more reach if I’d been on the ground in Seattle or Portland covering those protests. Unfortunately, the Japanese government took that possibility away from me by changing their travel rules so that anyone who didn’t have Japanese citizenship could leave Japan but they could not return.
That was me! Just one step below a citizen, I’d never gotten Japanese citizenship because it would require giving up my US citizenship and I still entertain the idea of moving back to the US. Why limit my options?
What a bunch of discriminatory bullshit! I thought.
If their purpose was to control the spread of a virus, which hasn’t a racist, umm, bone in its body, then why did one’s citizenship gain one the privilege to globetrot? Couldn’t a Japanese person return from harder-hit countries like the US carrying COVID-19 as easily as a foreigner like me could?
Now, in hindsight, I recognize that from the government’s perspective, foreigners are more likely to travel than natives during a pandemic and they probably perceived it as less politically dangerous just to restrict travel to foreigners.
Still, this was one of the many government policies I perceived as illogical and oppressive in 2020 and it led to a lot of anger at Japan — not just the government but the people around me who I understood had the right to travel that I didn’t. Unlike me, though, most of them were too afraid to exercise that right! Those privileged motherfuckers!
In the middle of all of this rage, I wrote what I think is one of my most important, timeless posts of 2020 about not projecting our Shadow onto the world, so maybe I’ll reflect on whether I was doing some of that with my rage against the Japanese government and its citizens then.
Shadow Projecting: The Dark Side of the 2020 Apocalypse
Why the answer to the wars ‘out there’ is to love your dark side and some ways to do thatbryanwinchell-japan.medium.com
But folks, if you’re wagging your finger at me right now, I’ll ask you this: Tell me you didn’t go off the handle in a way you now regret at least once in 2020. If you can, then I shall give you a pile of rocks to throw at my glass house. Otherwise … can we try to forgive each other a bit more for some of our behavior during that challenging year?
Fortunately, when I did share some of that rage in my writing, it came out in some epic poetry, the first one my attempt to broadly cover the paradox that is America, and the second a deeply heartfelt look back at the awful shit people like Christopher Columbus did to the native inhabitants of Turtle Island.
When the Statues Came Tumbling Down
A poetic declaration of interdependence and universal sovereignty from the slave masters of historymedium.com
By July, marooned in hot and sticky Japan without work and a wife who was increasingly losing her patience with me, I began to fall into a deep funk.
If you look at the dates of publication for my articles in 2020, you can see this trajectory of my decreasing enthusiasm for life. I was pretty active in spring, publishing several pieces per month, and by early summer, it was down to about one per week.
However, in July, I posted two articles that I think would make my top 10 of 2020 list.
The first, “Stop Killing Comedy or You’ll Kill Us All,” was a very creative, fun piece looking at the dangerous trend of censoring humor by social media companies and college campuses.
The second was about how I’d had a big intuition in the late 1990s that I could use the Internet to love or hate and how choosing love had made my life better, and how it could make yours better, too. I still regularly share both of these articles, so I’m grateful to myself that, despite being in a funk that summer, I wrote each of them.
Using Love to Clear the Cesspool of Social Media
In 1998, I was given a choice— use the Internet to love or to hate? — and choosing love was one of the best choices…bryanwinchell-japan.medium.com
Then, on August 10, I polished up and published two posts I’d written earlier in 2020. The first was a rare parenting post. I’m pretty hands-off as a dad, but I’m glad to see I’ve got at least one article in the genre.
After these posts, Medium readers didn’t hear from me for two full months.
Fall 2020: Time For Some Fiction, and a Shitty Election
I then reemerged with something that was, well, in line with the original intent of this blog to comment on current events but it was written from a very different angle. It was a short story called “The October Surprise, AKA The Trojan Teddy Bear” that I subtitled “a true story of fiction about 2020 based on outright lies.”
This nutso story was my attempt to capture the crazymaking zeitgeist of 2020, a story about a group of teddy bear assassins assigned to take out then-president Donald Trump at the behest of a cynical Hollywood screenwriter who was really an alien from Venus in an attempt to win a bet against John Cusack, which they made while high on LSD at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch after a screening of the movie 2012. Really, folks, you gotta read it to believe it!
The October Surprise, aka The Trojan Teddy Bear
A true story of fiction about 2020 based on outright liesmedium.com
While some of my writing in those last two months of 2020 was reasonably topical and thus not super interesting today, and there are typos in some of them that suggest my usual focused heart was not in them, they are still reasonably good blog posts.
However, fresh off the creative joy of writing the fiction of “The Trojan Teddy Bear,” I finished 2020 with a bang, publishing a novelette called “The Synchronicity Factory” that explores my fascination with the Jungian concept of synchronicity while continuing with the theme of extra-Earthly forces that influence human behaviors.
The Synchronicity Factory
Fiction: A comic take on the extra-dimensional forces that are behind the mysterious force of synchronicity and why we…medium.com
In addition, I came up with what is now, three years running, a yearly series, looking back on the year and commenting on what it taught me.
Overall, 2020 was an extremely challenging year, both collectively and individually. When I look back on these 47 posts I published, first I smile at noticing that I was 47 years old in 2020! More importantly, I believe my best writing is writing that covers bigger, more timeless topics. Topical and current events writing is important, it’s just not what drives my work from the deep part of my Soul, which is where I’d like to think the best artists are driven from.
Unfortunately, 2021 and 2022 were years where more often than not, not only didn’t I press the publish button too often, I often didn’t even begin the process of writing. There are lots of reasons for this, including self-censorship driven by vague Medium policies, which I’ll get into in the final two posts of this series. That said, there are still some really good articles that I’m eager to share. See you, then!
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.