Five HUNDRED Articles
I have published five hundred articles over the past four years.
hello everyone
My name is Emmett, Em, Emmy, Emma — whatever you want to call me, and I have been writing on Medium now since late 2018, though I had a few posts trailing from 2018. This Medium experience for me began whenever I was in school, the counselors had us draft up a list of different daily, yearly, and even more long-term goals to advance our careers in the field and get ourselves out there. The way that writing on Medium started for me was through this, as one of my goals was to create engaging content about science, programming, and other topics.
I have stuck to my goals that I put forth in this context, as I considered it a great opportunity to lay out my life and future in a consumable format. Fortunately, everything there has not exactly gone to plan, which taught me a lot of life lessons and has given me a lot more experience in living my life when things do not go correctly. I am thankful for such experiences where things did not go to plan. Since 2020 with the death of my brother, things have just been different — and life seems to be very much manic and not going according to plan ever since then. I mean right now I live in Alabama, a place I never imagined myself landing in; but I am here for some reason.
On the bright-side, I am near Huntsville. For those who are unfamiliar, as I was not familiar, Huntsville is like what Atlanta is to Georgia to Alabama.
Despite things not going to plan though, I am really happy I have stuck with my pledge to content creation. There was definitely personal development that occurred as a direct result of the desire to also express my creativity and ideas online as well as not-so-online. I had been programming since childhood as a completely self-taught little programmer, which was a negative in some ways because a lot of times I did not know how to communicate effectively. Thankfully, meeting people online helped me to gain the proper humility and care to effectively work with others on projects, and this is yet another thing I have been thankful for.
The community here on Medium has been incredible to me. Throughout my experience, I have not only written about the professional topic of Data Science, but also issues that are more personal to me. These sorts of topics always received heart-warming responses here on Medium, and some of the holes I was in early on I genuinely feel like I couldn’t get out of without the support of my friends and community here on Medium. Just to cite an example, a few years ago I wrote a piece where I came out and talked about an alcohol-dependent addiction. It is a much easier trap to fall into than people think, and the stigma of an alcoholic is a dead-beat old man who screams at everyone. However, addiction comes in many forms, and I was using alcohol as a stress reliever. I would come home from work, and the first thing I would do is ‘ crack open a cold one’ and sit at my computer and do stuff. I began to identify that this was a cycle, and one that I was ashamed of.
Long story short, whenever I have written about topics like these, I have had an enormous outpouring of support. I am so appreciative of such support, it is not quantifiable how much it had meant to me at the time — and furthermore, going through the rest of my life. I would describe myself as a very sensitive and emotional “ internalizer,” and internally, a lot of those messages really helped to improve my confidence and overall happiness. Thank you all for continuing to support me. It might seem like a minuscule thing, but even simple conversations typically brighten my day. I am a very shy person “ off the paper,” so getting dialog from people in text format is definitely a great way for me to experience connections without the anxiety.
Still though, I did want to touch on the fact that I have not done enough. It is difficult because there are not that many hours of the day. Despite the fact that I am proud to now have five HUNDRED articles, I also think this is a very low amount. In an ideal world, I would at least be posting daily. Over the course of three years, daily posts would mean that I would have hit five hundred articles last year. I also would really like to make more than one daily post, as well as a weekly video. A lot of these goals have been coming more into fruition recently, but I find that using all of my free time for grinding on articles, open-source projects, and videos is incredibly stressful and horrible for my mental health. The reward is a substantial trade-off, though. I do not even write Julia at my job, changing tech-stack is not necessarily a favorite thing to do for a business because it costs money. That being said, being able to collaborate, meet, and discuss topics such as Julia and the other topics I talk about here has expanded my knowledge in a lot of ways while also making life enjoyable. That being said, while it certainly is stressful, I still cannot help but wish I did this more often. I am going to try to at least get one article out each day going forward, which is definitely a goal.
Thank you all for supporting me through thick and thin and reading my articles, communicating with me, and overall just being involved and including me. All I have ever wanted from society and social scenario is to be involved, and content creation has expanded my voice to where I feel involved — which is eternally reading. I hope everyone has a wonderful day. Thanks for pushing me up to 500 articles, I cannot wait to hit 1,000 !
