Who the heck is Meaghan Ward?

Have you missed me or forgotten about me?

If you’re reading this, it’s because you are one of the 1,400 people “Meaghan” has accumulated on this email list.

“Meaghan” as you have known her, is dead.

I am not going to be writing about sex anymore.

The sex writing hat is getting hung on a wall where I plan to leave it to get dusty until everyone forgets it existed in the first place.

I can’t say I’m not sad to see her go, but there are parts of her I will miss, and those are the parts that were never afraid to tell her stories and share her most intimate moments.

Being a writer on the internet is hard.

Being a sex writer on the internet is even harder.

As I said on my new About page, I have no hard feelings if you aren’t interested in reading things from me anymore.

After all, I’m just a boring mom in her 40s who complains a lot, and I am rebooting this Substack specifically to keep complaining and offering my unsolicited opinions on ways the world could be made better.

So. 🤷‍♀️ You know where to find the Unsubscribe link.

Still here? Cool. Let me reintroduce myself.

I spent years being one of the “top” sex writers on Medium back in the golden years when we could make thousands of dollars a month and actually use Medium as a significant source of income.

Clearly, those years are over.

I still spend a lot of time reading over on Medium, and every single day I see another writer complain about how that platform is experiencing a tough bout of enshittification.

About two years ago it became clear to me that I was not going to be able to make a living and support myself with writing alone.

I had to get a “real” full-time job, and while I love the work that I do, I loathe having a boss and having my livelihood in someone else’s hands.

This means I have much less time than I used to for writing and reading.

I’ve been going through an identity crisis for ages:

Do I start writing under my real name so the real me can take the pride and praise of anything that is good?

Do I leverage “Meaghan’s” following to re-boot my writing practice?

Or should I just make up a whole new identity and start over?

Ex-Meaghan won, and it wasn’t just because of the numbers.

I know that there are still a lot of people on Medium who used to regularly read and comment on my articles. Some of those people I talked to privately, some of them became friends, some became writing clients.

But there were also a lot of people who came to read only to become enraged and leave nasty comments to a stranger (me), because I wasn’t just a sex writer, I wrote a lot about affairs, too.

Because I was in one, and it was a hot fucking mess.

So here’s where I am going to be a hypocrite and admit it:

Years ago, my boyfriend wrote on Medium about our affair, too. I didn’t know about it until I did, and when I read what he wrote, some of it was so horrible and hurtful, it broke me, and us.

Essentially, he was saying he loved me, but he wished he’d never had an affair and seemed to be on a mission to tell the world “don’t be stupid and do what I did”.

Yeah, that hurt to read.

But you know what?

I agree with him now.

I agree with everything he said.

Now, I want to say it too, among other things I want to write about like:

Disability. Poverty. Education. Writing. Long COVID. Love. Relationships. Work. Homelessness. Affairs. Parenting. AI. The future. The past. And why the fuck are we living in a world where too many people think Trump is a good idea?

I don’t want to hold back anymore.

I am sick of making myself small to let others feel bigger.

I am sick of apologizing for who I am to people who don’t care about me anyway.

This is my life.

It’s not easy, it’s often sad and disappointing, and every day is a physical and mental struggle until the end.

Writing and sharing my writing is one of my favorite things to do, and I am tired of not doing it because I am scared of what people will think.

This is a new beginning for me and “Meaghan”, and I’m taking this advice as I think we all should:

Still here?

Thanks for reading; I hope you’ll continue.