500 reads on Medium. Awesome. Happy Halloween 2021.

No, I’m not here to tell you about my journey to 500 reads and my 3 bucks. And if I get to 1 million reads, you won’t see “How I made… on Medium” from Alexei Sorokin. Enough of that shit. I wrote a little about it here (Shitty storylines I will never pursue).

Yet, I’m here to share my sincere joy, the butterflies in my stomach from falling in love with writing on Medium. Yeah, I’m being very direct in complimenting this platform.

People are reading. Let me state that word again. READING. I don’t care if they are clapping or not. I don’t care if they decide to follow me (would be nice of course). What’s important is that complete strangers are making the choice, the effort to spend a few minutes to explore the world of a, well, complete stranger. Medium is social media, I guess, but it’s so different from the rest, where the effort to process a post (or post a post for that matter) is about the same as for me to scratch my itchy balls. I don’t have anything against that ‘other’ social media. I use it quite a bit myself. But it’s so refreshing and exciting to also have a platform that forces you to rise above the level of Donald Trump’s ways of expressing yourself. When I refer to Trump, I’m referring to most of us. Sharing a picture on Instagram is not much different from Trump’s simplistic tweets.

Even 2–3 minutes of reading requires focus and attention. I certainly struggle with it a lot. My favorite book of all time is Brothers Karamazov so I can appear an intellectual…