Rebooting My Medium Profile
This is not my first Medium profile. I had my first one for several years, but in November 2021, I ran into what I would call an “identity crisis.” I think it primarily had to do with the one-year anniversary of my wife’s death, but there were other contributing factors that I won’t go into here.
Regardless of the cause, I definitely had an identity crisis. It wasn’t related to or the fault of Medium in any way, but my Medium profile became a victim of this crisis, among other things, as I sought to purge my online writing and much of my online presence from the Internet.
So I completely deleted my Medium profile. Burned the bridge. Scorched the earth. Completely reformatted the hard drive. (Have I used enough analogies?)
Now, a few months later, I’m ready to reboot, to rebuild, and here is why I’m ready now when I wasn’t ready before.
#1. I need to face my Imposter Syndrome.
Others have written about Imposter Syndrome, and I know I’m not unique in struggling with this issue.
I also admit that, at least for me, it’s mostly self-inflicted, as I place expectations on myself that others don’t: that I have to be some kind of authority or expert, that I have to know things other people don’t, that I have to be “cutting edge,” etc. I’m realizing these things just aren’t true.
Melody Wilding, LMSW has done some great work on this topic of Imposter Syndrome, and I’ve really benefited from her material.
I don’t need to be an expert here; I just need to be authentic.
#2. I miss the Medium community & platform.
I think Medium has a good community — there are a lot of good people writing here. I’ve missed following those good writers, as well as the emails from Medium with recommended reading (I think I had curated a pretty good list of areas of interest).
Additionally, I think there’s something good and unique about the interaction here — the ability to comment on or share a specific statement or sentence. And from my experience, whenever I’ve interacted with an author, they’ve responded to me, and people who commented on my previous posts were helpful.
I’ve also been working through some of the Ship 30 for 30 materials and I agree with their idea that today’s Digital Writers need to be social and writing on a social platform. Medium is even one of their recommended platforms.
#3. I still have things to say.
When I erased my previous profile, I didn’t actually lose any of the writing — all of those posts were backed up to Markdown files in iCloud (yes, via Obsidian). So I could pretty easily post something from earlier if I want.
But I continue to have new ideas and new things to say.
So here I am again, with a goal to stick around this time.
