What I Learned Writing for Change (Literally)

It’s not every month I get an email from Medium congratulating me on my “monthly earnings.” Most months the number isn’t quite enough to cover a trip to Del Taco, but if I budget carefully, I think I could afford a nice cream-filled donut—maybe two, or maybe a half dozen if I buy the ones that somehow didn’t end up with any cream in them. Dunford Bakery refers to those euphemistically as “seconds.”

My most recent email: $22 earned over two months. It’s not nothing, and it made me laugh when I thought about the number of months that I’ve earned $4 or $5 when I’ve published articles, in some cases, every day.

I’ve spent nine months pouring my heart and soul into more than 140 articles where I’ve done a lot of introspection. And I’ve been paid in… pastries.

Alright, not really pastries (mostly). My wife and I often joke that if I keep it up for the next 1,000 years, we’ll be able to retire on my Medium earnings.

It’s funny, though. That last email caught me off guard a little, and it had nothing to do with the earnings. I stared at that email, thinking about what it really represented. In the last 9 months, I’ve become a grown man who writes almost every day, not for money, but because something inside me literally won’t shut up until I sit down and write. I’ve built companies, I’ve written two books, I’ve raised kids, and yet the thing that finally taught me how to look at myself honestly wasn’t therapy or leadership seminars or a midlife crisis. It was $22 on a writing platform.

I can’t really explain it, and I’m not really sure I even want to.

I started writing on Medium in 2018 as an experiment. I’ve always enjoyed writing but stopped doing it a long time before that. Medium became this, well medium, for me to see if the rust on my creative gears could be scraped off. I thought I’d write a few things, learn a trick or two, maybe enjoy the feeling of hitting “publish.” In late 2024, I quit my job, then the essays just kept coming. I wrote through exhaustion. I wrote through work deadlines as I was transitioning away from a company I helped build to the one I’m building now. I wrote when I should have been resting. I wrote when I didn’t want to. I wrote when I felt something break deep inside my chest and the only way to handle it was to put the broken pieces somewhere.

Somewhere safe. Somewhere true to who I was becoming.

I don’t know why I selected a public forum like Medium. I never expected to make any money at all (and I don’t most months). Honestly, though, it’s that I didn’t expect to learn anything from writing for change — literal change, the kind you have to save up just to drop into a vending machine. But I did.

I learned that the things I thought would matter never did. No one cared about the pieces I labored over for hours. No one applauded the sentences that made me most proud. It’s funny. The posts that seemed to reach the most people were the ones I wrote quickly, in moments when I wasn’t trying so hard.

It seems that the people who have read what I’ve written don’t expect me to be impressive. They want me to be vulnerable. To be human.

A really important lesson I’ve learned is that writing will show you patterns in your life that you can’t see while moving at full speed. Writing slows you down, even when you resist it. It can also hold up a mirror, the way a doctor does when they’re trying to show you something you’ve been ignoring. And sometimes what you see is embarrassing. Sometimes it’s emotional. Sometimes it’s a fifteen-year-old wound you thought had scarred over long ago. And sometimes it’s just a reminder that you still haven’t fixed the “clapping” cabinet in the kitchen.

I learned that vulnerability is cheaper than Del Taco, but I also learned it’s worth more than anything money could buy.

Somewhere around essay sixty, the whole project stopped being about “content” and started being about something else. I still can’t name it, exactly. Maybe it was humility or surrender. Maybe it was the simple fact that putting words on the page reminded me I was alive, and choosing to live, in a way that had nothing to do with productivity.

I also learned that writing doesn’t fix your life. Not in some dramatic, movie-ending kind of way. It does, however, help you pay attention. And once you start paying attention, you start noticing the small mercies, the ridiculous patterns, and the beautiful moments you would have rushed past before.

Like the way your kids look at you when they think you aren’t watching.

Or the way your wife laughs with her whole face when you say something genuinely stupid.

Or the way you keep learning the same lessons in slightly different packaging.

Nine months of essays. More than 140 in all. Enough words to fill a large-ish book, or maybe a small landfill. And I earned enough to buy a donut. Maybe two.

What a beautiful, ridiculous return on investment.

What Medium paid me doesn’t hold a candle to what the writing itself gave me: clarity, courage, softness, so many tears that I wouldn’t previously give myself permission to shed, a reason to keep going, a deeper sense of myself, and the strange, steady knowledge that sometimes the best things in life come disguised as side projects.

So here I am, writing a celebratory closer that isn’t really a celebration so much as a nod to the absurdity of it all. I wrote for change. Literal change. And in the process, something in me changed too.

I’ll shrug at that truth later. Maybe smile. Maybe buy the donut this month. (I’ll definitely buy the donut this month.)

It feels like the right way to end this run. Low-key. Grateful. Slightly amused at myself.

And that is enough.