It Happened on Medium: May 2024 roundup
Last month’s most-read stories, most-highlighted sentences, and some of our favorite stories in honor of Mental Health Awareness Month
Published on: 2024-06-16
Success comes from failure. Nobody likes to hear this, much less experience it — wouldn’t it be much more comfortable if we could simply succeed the first time, without having to suffer the indignities of failure? But it’s the nature of humanity; we try, we fail, we get back up and try again, and at some point we figure it out. Medium has so many great human stories from writers, and while there are plenty of tales of triumph, they also share when they’ve failed — and what they’ve learned from it. I love reading those stories because even though most failures are deeply personal, the experience of failing is shared. It’s wonderful to experience that shared emotion, transmitted through the writer’s words to my screen. David Mandell wrote a beautiful essay on the nature of failure, both the external failure of moving back in with his parents as a 31-year-old screenwriter and about the much more internal failure of how he got caught up in trying to be someone he wasn’t. “That’s my real failing: losing who I am to gain the adoration of people who don’t really know me. It has been long overdue for me to relinquish my mask,” he writes. Artist and author Eva Schicker writes about her failure to make AI image generation spit out something she wanted. “The mornings after my AI binges were haunting. I had nothing to show for my countless hours spent prompting. My eyes hurt, my brain, too,” she writes. “Drawing perfection lies in its imperfections.” In the writing about writing section, memoirist Grace Loh Prasad writes about writing a memoir that fails to appeal to everyone. “If you’re struggling to write your memoir, this is my advice: Stop trying to appeal to everyone. Ultimately, as a memoirist you can only be successful by being absolutely, unapologetically yourself.”