Writing On Medium Feels Like Ripping The Scars Off Old Wounds

But I think that’s a good thing.

I started writing regularly for Medium not that long ago. It was a lark, some way to get my work out there without the gatekeeper and the lag time of publishing in lit mags. And I had a pile of grief from my mother’s death. I had written about it, but I had barely shared. Then the two-year anniversary of her death came and I decided it was time to pull the rest of the pieces out of the folder of sadness and put them up — for the sake of my grief, if nothing else.

Photo by Kristina Tripkovic on Unsplash

It was cathartic even to post them, like I was honoring her and my love for her by putting them somewhere to be read instead of gathering digital dust on my laptop. Then the second one got some interest. I think it was even featured, but it also got a lot of views. And I felt relieved. Maybe I was less alone in my grief than I thought. So I decided to jump head first into the Medium pond.

It wasn’t my first foray into online writing. I’d been a mom blogger some years before, back when the whole world was enamored with mom bloggers. I wrote as part of a collective and it was fun. Moms from all over the US posted twice a month and there were occasional offline events where we got to know one another. Then the collective sold to a tech company and became something entirely…