Eternal Love

So I've just posted the last chapter of my ONE HUNDREDTH Call the Midwife fic (terrifying but true).

Here are a couple more scary facts and a couple just for interest:

Total number of words - 659,288 (which equates to approximately 7.3 novels)

My first CtM fic was posted on 02/08/2014 and was A Careful Eye

The longest single fic is The Ground of Mercy

Unlocked received the most Kudos and More Than Human the most comments

The most recent fic is The Odd Couple - Part 1 and as the name suggests there's more to come!

Thank you so much to everyone who's popped in or been there for the whole journey - while I joke that I only write because I struggle to find the fic I want to read, it's you guys who help me justify the time and effort involved.

You have to remember: People are being paid a lot of money to use the most powerful tools in the history of the world to capture your attention, and then they are giving you access to those tools for free.

(This should give you some idea just how valuable your attention is.)

So the first thing I'd say is that you should not be too hard on yourself that you spend a lot of time scrolling. Scrolling is incredibly and (literally) unprecedentedly good at distracting us from boredom or ennui or whatever else we would otherwise be feeling.

Walking and writing, meanwhile, are much less good at distraction. They are better than staring at the ceiling, maybe, but not better than Instagram or Tiktok.

The problem, which you point out above, is that Instagram and Tiktok both solve for anxiety/boredom/isolation in the short run and worsen anxiety/boredom/isolation in the long run. And so you have to make incredibly difficult, counterintuitive decisions to resist the most powerful attention-holding tools ever created.

After ten years of dreaming, eight years of government support, six years of fundraising (we needed $50,000,000!), and five years of construction, the Paul Farmer Maternal Center of Excellence at Koidu Government Hospital finally saw its first patients on February 14th.

13 babies were born at the MCOE that day. Several were admitted to the NICU, the first in Sierra Leone's history. The MCOE is already radically transforming the kind of maternal and infant care available in eastern Sierra Leone.

Five thousand babies will be born at the MCOE this year. 5,000 more will be born there next year, and the year after that, and the year after that--hopefully for decades. The healthcare workforce of the entire nation will grow stronger because the MCOE is a teaching hospital training the next generation of Sierra Leonean nurses, midwives, and doctors.

Our little corner of the Internet used to be much bigger--today the average vlogbrothers video gets 150,000 views, whereas in 2015 it got 500,000 views. Nobody's making sketches on SNL about my history of tuberculosis the way they did about The Fault in Our Stars.

And yet, although our community and fanbase are smaller than they were 10 years ago, they're also much more powerful. This is true in terms of fundraising; it's also true in terms of, like, successfully bullying large corporations to lower the price of tuberculosis tests. As a social movement, nerdfighteria is at its peak, even if it's well past its peak as a pop culture phenomenon.

I won't lie: I found being near the center of U.S pop culture very unpleasant. But not only that, it wasn't very effective as a fandom or social movement, precisely because it was so broad. What it's become now--an online community with strong values and a deep, 19-year understanding of itself--is so much cooler and more valuable than when the phenomenon of Hank&John were at their "peak."