My Top Five Medium Stories in 2020

And what I learned about the world and my writing

Cara Harbstreet (She/Her)

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I’ve been as absent from this platform as I’ve ever been.

My first published story went live on Medium in July 2019. Which feels simultaneously as if it were yesterday and a lifetime ago. I wrote it in response to a Human Parts prompt and it was immensely helpful for me as I worked through some lingering body image issues. It was the summer before I turned 30. I had just finalized my divorce. Work was steady but routine, and I needed a creative outlet, so I finally transitioned from Medium reader to Medium writer.

Since then, I’ve published nearly 100 pieces, with a respectable 55.3% curation rate. Of my last 15 stories, 13 were curated. And I admit, that was part of the fun. The game, if you will.

I liked the sense that my writing was deemed “high quality” by someone other than me, though I admit I felt disappointed when a piece I really loved failed to meet those opaque standards. And with the recent changes in curation disabling a writer’s ability to see which categories they were curated in…well, it’s just not the same.

That was part of why I wrote less in the past five months. After a consistent start to 2020, even in the midst of the pandemic, my writing remained steady. Until it didn’t. I was burnt out, lacking motivation and inspiration, and more often than not, just wanted to trudge through the days on autopilot.

I can’t be alone in feeling that way — I genuinely believed the pandemic would not explode into what it did, and that by the end of the year, we’d know where things were going. By summer, when the second wave hit, it became clear that was a massively incorrect assumption.

But despite that dip in activity, views, reads, and earnings remained level. I’ve acquired over 1300 followers (thank you to any of you who are reading this!) and though I no longer compulsively check my stats, I can see that some readers remained engaged with my writing on the rare…

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Cara Harbstreet (She/Her)

Lover of carbs and puns, call me Cara Carbstreet | Anxious Millennial | Coffee Enthusiast | Non-diet Dietitian