for the things that I truly sought to end — I was so grateful for this realization — I didn’t seek death but I Desperately sought to end the fear and panic I constantly felt In my every bone and even to the core of the nucleus I bore. I don’t know how to write poems. I’ve never written poems…

Predictions for what comes after the bitter winter — In my city, there’s no such thing as spring. If seasons were colors, you’d draw their passing as a bright navy blue line for winter next to a crimson red for summer. You won’t find hues of green, yellow, or orange in between. One moment it’s bone-chattering cold, and the…

I started writing because I was jealous of writers. The way their words affected me had something to do with it, I'm assuming. Eventually, blogging became a lifestyle of sort and also the means to and end—making a living. It kept evolving from there. These days, aside from making money, I write to also make sense of the world around me. As a "voracious reader," I feel as though I haven't processed any information until I've connected the dots between the information I'm consuming and my lived experiences. And writing is how I connect those dots.

This is awesome! I'd like for this to help the Afghan refugees, if possible.

Thank you for sharing my comment in this shortlist :) It was interesting reading everyone else's take on this. I also like what Ece has said about letting readers make the decision—it makes sense!

It's probably by design, and regardless, some of this can be dangerous (as can be said about some of the misinformation campaigns on Facebook.) But I guess, for now, most of these pieces are also really stupid, and most Medium users seem to be smarter than Facebook or Twitter users. But that fact that these stories are finding their ways to people's feeds means that it's not long before Medium joins the ranks for FB and Twitter too... which is what I fear at this point.

I know Delta and everything, but as soon as the coffee shops opened up in my city and I was armed with two jabs of the Pfizer vax, I was down there on the daily, at times twice a day. The productivity since June 2021 has gone through the roof to the sky and beyond! I even managed to snag a Medium bonus thanks to all the writing I accomplished strictly out of the two coffee shops in my neighborhood. HAH!

And here we thought the NYT was supposed to be the bastion of journalistic integrity. LOL. I mean, what the actual F***!

I live in a city where I feel the passive aggressiveness of the majority White community at large, yet, the few White acquaintances I have met, the ones who claim to be liberals, profess that is not the case, and I'm a little too sensitive. This often makes me question…