My Most Delusional Stories About Love, Ranked
Medium provides an unflinching record of every time I lost my mind.
I like to say that I started writing on Medium because I wanted to scratch an itch, an itch that made me want to learn the craft of writing, how to turn a phrase. But the truth is that some of my Medium stories are just, like, completely fucking delusional. It will come as a shock to no one that these stories are about love.
Bored, I recently scrolled through my old stories to see if I’ve learned anything about writing. To say I cringed is a wild understatement. Some of the writing really sucked. But worse, several of the stories were about a very meh relationship with a guy named Ian — my high school boyfriend that became my middle-aged boyfriend for a few months — except instead of being honest about the suckiness of the relationship, I wrote stories about how great it all was.
Pathetic. As Samuel Daniel says in Hymen’s Triumph, “Love is a sickness full of woes/All remedies refusing.” Still, that’s no excuse for writing such completely bonkers stories.
Worse, the stories had an air of self-help about them; I shared “lessons” I learned from this objectively very bad “relationship,” as if sharing them was going to help readers in their own relationships. Wow. Not cool. Not cool…
