Is This Goodbye?

Carrie Hayes
2 min readMar 1, 2022

Here is my ‘Dear John’ letter from Medium.

Must I really rack up more followers if I want to stay?

F. Scott Fitzgerald put it best, “one doesn’t write because one wants to say something. One writes because one has something to say.”

And there’s something somewhat ‘spinning wheel of death’ (as it’s called in Mac-speak) about the frenzied need to spew copy on this site. For myself, when I haven’t been submitting, I have been really happy reading pieces by Terry L Cooper and Adeline Dimond, Steffany Ritchie, Stephanie Buckley, just to name a few, without pressing my material upon others.

Some of my pieces have been rejected from publications. Others, which I think are pretty good, are barely read at all. And that’s ok. Then there are those pieces I am saving until I am certain they are where they need to be for me to press the Publish button. Until then, I’m working on a novel.

If having only 70 something followers makes me unworthy to be a Medium partner, well, then I’ll just take my unfinished drafts and go!

But it seems to me that the landscape here needs discerning readers as much as it does great writers- and, truth be told, one has to ask oneself whether the link between the two is fully valued by the site’s bosses.

In the last ten days, I have received over 50 emails in my daily feed from Medium. That’s a lot! If I were to read every last one of these articles, I would get no writing done whatsoever.

So I leave it to you.

If I should stay, please follow me- and I’ll return the favor.

If not… well, it’s been swell.

Thanks for the ride.

- Banksy

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Carrie Hayes

writes historical fiction and is the host of the podcast Angry Dead Women. linktr.ee/carriehayeswrites