To Every Reader And Writer On Medium: Thank You Very Much.
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You guys are all phenomenal, you truly are.
The very first time I heard about Medium was in October 2017 at a board meeting. Once I went on and began to view the articles on display, I was immediately hooked.
And I have been hooked ever since.
It’s no exaggeration to say that being here on this platform has been truly life changing.
Back during my office days in Lagos, pre-Covid, I would get up at 3–3.30am, work out for 90 minutes, get to my office desk at 5:30am, armed with my cup of coffee, ready to do a full day’s work.
But before any work could take place, reading Thomas Oppong, Ayodeji Awosika and Tim Denning was essential to starting my day. It is fair to say that their articles were usually the shot in the arm needed to get through the day.
It was also at this time that I got to discover other marquee writers such as Ezinne Ukoha, Nicholas Cole. With Mr. Cole, I was slightly incredulous that someone so young, could be so brilliant and accomplished.
The idea of having the publication devoted to African literature was truly a masterstroke. Reading diverse stories on Kalahari was a huge revelation, because it reminded me of the many brilliant authors, I read as a boy in the 80s and 90s.
Shannon Ashley was another writer that I paid very close attention to, someone whose articles made a striking impression.
Then in 2018, there was a game changer; Medium announced that it would pay writers for its articles and with that announcement, a revolution began.
Not once did it occur to me, back then, that I could earn a cent out of reading, for I never saw myself as a writer, whose work would be read by anyone, never mind hundreds and thousands of people.
But then in 2020, the extraordinary happened.
The world turned on its head and with it, jobs, livelihoods and everything you could think of disappeared, when the pandemic swept through our lives in those perilous months.
As with most people, I wasn’t insulated when this happened and in the twinkling of an eye, I found myself without work, without a livelihood and without a pot…
