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- @MarxTwain
- Aug 25
- 2 min read
Updated: Sep 4
Reflections on community, new writer spotlights, and the most popular topics with our readers this month
What does community mean to you? The answer probably changes depending on how you’re feeling about yourself and the world.
Right now, many stories on Medium paint a vivid picture of the dark side of community. Not belonging to one when you need support, feeling like you don’t matter to your community, losing your community, feeling burned out from showing up for your community — writers share all those experiences and more.
For example,
writes about how,as a man struggling with IVF and infertility, he didn’t have a community to help him cope.“Men often find themselves in an emotional vacuum, unsure of whether they’re even allowed to grieve or struggle.”
shares how her mother was illegally adopted out of Pinochet’s Chile, and intentionally separated from her siblings by a well-meaning case worker.
, writes about how much it hurts when we feel our community doesn’t care about us. “There are seasons of our lives when we feel haunted by the sense that we don’t really matter to other people,” he writes.
However, they all touch on the beauty of community as well. “…[T]he way we teach men to be fathers has to start long before their child is even born…To men like me going through this process, know that you are not alone,” writes
, building his own community where he found none.
, follows up with how to matter to your community: figure out what matters to them, and uphold those values. And
describes how it felt when she was able to find her mother’s long-lost siblings, and her own cousins: “[T]he heritage that felt impossibly distant is now close. I am a part of it. I can see how I fit into it.”
For us here at Medium, community means that anyone else who has a story to tell can find a place to share that story (or stories!) with readers. We’re proud to be doing the work to build that place.
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