This was an incredible piece of writing and I'm so glad you submitted it here so I saw it and read it. I could make very minor nit-picky comments but really it is a great piece, well written, meaningful, personal, useful. You not only share your experiences but point the way to how others could have helped you, and thus by extension people in their own orbits.

I think your biggest mistake was not submitting it to a publication. I get it. When I write something intensely personal it's hard to put it in front of an editor. Plus, I often want to see it published immediately. Now that I'm over 1K folllowers I often do self publish these stories and it goes fine. But when you are still starting out on Medium it takes a real lottery win type scenario for a self published story to take off.

My approach in the early days was to wait however long it took and try multiple times to get my best stuff into a publication while what I considered fluff I might self publish.