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My Best Articles of 2021

A completely subjective, biased, opinionated list

7 min readJan 16, 2022
The beach on Harrison Lake, BC, where I spent most of the year. Photo by author.

Another year of writing on Medium

A year in which the platform has seen some major changes, including the demise of major publications (I still miss you,

!) and the steady shift that all online platforms of this type must inevitably go through. Money on the Internet is blood in the water, and dull-eyed predators can’t afford to ignore it.

I’ve had one foot out of the door since I got here. Yet here I still am. Still reading. Still writing. Still nurturing the connections I’ve made here with people I wouldn’t have met any other way.

I don’t do it for the money. When I first started writing here, my intention was to build a fan base for my fiction. I’ve given up on that too. I’ve come close enough to my dreams that I have a good idea what they would look like, and they’ve lost most of their appeal.

We all like to complain. Looking at the numbers, a good moan seems like a surefire path to literary success around here. But honestly, more than anything else, I’m grateful. Grateful that Medium has encouraged me to write more than I ever have before in my life. That it’s forced me to confront why I do this and why I persist in doing it, even when I know I’m not going to gain anything…

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Ryan Frawley
Ryan Frawley

Written by Ryan Frawley

Novelist. Essayist. Former entomologist. Now a full-time writer exploring travel, art, philosophy, psychology, and science. www.ryanfrawley.com

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