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My 13 Best Essays of 2022
Greatest Hits, Volume 5.
When 2022 began, I thought I was finished at Medium. Not because I didn’t love the place, or because it stopped being good to me, but because I felt like I ran out of things to say.
That sounds ridiculous to you, but I was dead-ass serious. In 2021, I even penned my goodbye.
I’m famously self-deprecating, but I’d comfortably stack my 133-essay winning streak between February 2018 and July 2019 against the output of anyone else on this platform. That’s not bravado; that’s just facts. No one else did what I did in that span, nor attracted as many eyeballs. Check the tape.
Yet after that seemingly endless content monsoon—everything between “The Art of Intimacy” and “The 7 Noble Pursuits” at this point can be comfortably categorized as my “Classic Period” — I dried up, and I thought I’d peaked creatively.
[Author’s Note: I wrote four of my 10 most popular essays of all time in a row, between January 29 and February 1, 2018. If you want to know when I stopped being anonymous and started becoming a “thing” — on this platform, anyway — it was exactly then.]
For three full years after that, I’d only sparingly hit that level of quality. Highlights were rare, but still high: I never once got as poignant or avant-garde as I would on “We Will…
