This is a long read recap of my experiences at this year’s XOXO festival in Portland, OR from Sept 5–8, 2019. While I do talk about how certain things made me feel and what I took from them, this is a recap post. Coming soon will be a post where I process everything that happened and distill some lessons for myself and my personal practice.

Estimated Reading Time: 25 minutes

What is XOXO

For those who have not heard me rave about XOXO before, I usually describe it as “a festival for people who make a living being creative on the internet.” It’s a four day festival that happens in Portland, OR each September. It highlights what’s new and exciting in many various mediums, including video games, tabletop gaming, podcasts, and video. It also offers a slate of conference talks that tend to center around being present on the internet, using it as a platform to share your creative work, and how to deal with the very real issues and complications of an increasingly-online life. 

While I would say that’s an accurate baseline description, the truth is that it encompasses so much more than just that. XOXO is a community of the most kind, caring, and supportive people I’ve ever met. The festival employs a lottery system (you can read about the lottery system here) to ensure that attendance is diverse, eclectic, and accessible to as many people as possible. Festival organizers and volunteers highly prioritize the safety and comfort of their attendees, adapting and making changes on the fly to improve the experience. Invited speakers and people displaying new work are carefully chosen to highlight a variety of different and interesting work that is unique and accessible to all.

The festival also actively works to acknowledge and validate the emotionally-fraught relationship we have with the creative work we do. When I go to other conferences or festivals, I can confidently talk about the work I do at Ideum and the good it does. When I’m talking about my own personal projects, I have a lot of anxiety about their validity. This festival is a place where we not only talk about the projects that excite us, but also about how hard it can be to see them as valid, even in our own eyes. We can acknowledge the emotional labor that goes into just validating our own efforts. 

XOXO, Day One

Public Transit Misadventures

After my flight from Albuquerque via Oakland (on which I reflected on what had changed between this XOXO and last year), we touched down smoothly at Portland International Airport. I’ve now flown into Portland enough times that getting from the gates to the train is not a nervous endeavor for me. I rode the train into downtown and got checked into the Downtown Hilton with no issues. By the time I got settled in, it was still hours before the official XOXO shuttle would start running between the venue and hotels. I had another 90 minutes left on my Hop pass, so I decided I would take the public transit to Revolution Hall.

Warning: Whining on the Yacht ahead…

In Albuquerque, public transportation is not a terribly reliable way to get anywhere. Albuquerque is also a very drivable city and it’s easy to get somewhere in about 15 minutes or less by car. I compared the price of a Lyft from the hotel to the venue and, trying to save a bit of money, decided I would go without. Apple Maps plotted me along a train and streetcar path that should have only taken about 40 minutes, and I figured I could try it. 

It took me over an hour to get to the venue, and was honestly so stressful and frustrating: the wait-wait-hurry, trying to make sure I was at the right pick-up, making sure I didn’t miss a stop. A $13 Lyft for the sake of my nerves would have honestly been worth it. I’m sure that if I lived in a place where public transit was a viable option that I regularly used, I would have had a much easier time of it. That is however not the case. I very much acknowledge and am grateful for the resources in my life which means I don’t have to worry about these things, but it was honestly a big anxiety trigger just before heading into a weekend I already had a lot of anxiety about.

End Yacht Whine.

Revolution Hall, Registration, and Saying Hello

After the 2018 experiment of increasing the size of the festival and relocating it to the Veterans Memorial Coliseum,  XOXO returned to Revolution Hall (and its smaller attendee size) in 2019. I had also attended in 2016 and I was familiar with the venue, but hadn’t been back in three years. The venue has definitely grown since I was last there, with popular public bars in the space as well as a number of other accommodations. 

To get ahead of myself a little bit, I was very happy with the return to Rev Hall. The space felt so much better engineered to facilitate the casual and easy-to-connect experience that XOXO builds into itself. The coliseum was a difficult space in which to feel cozy, intimate, connected, and Rev Hall gave all that in spades. It’s a definitely balancing act between growing a festival like this and still making it feel true to the promise of what the event intends to do. I believe that the choice of a smaller, more intimate event was definitely for the benefit of the experience as a whole.

Once I was at the venue, I checked in and got this year’s swag:

• One color-coded attendee badge with name and project
• One incredibly comfortable t-shirt with unique yearly XOXO design
• One pronoun pin for easy identification of preferred pronouns (he/him)
• One conference and festival guide, with additional notes pages
• One map of venue and surrounding recommended businesses and restaurants
• Three-pack of scout books with unique yearly XOXO design 

A note on the badges: I go to a fair amount of conferences and like to keep my attendee badges. Most of them end up in a box with cards and other keepsakes, but not my XOXO badges. I hang these up on the lamppost next to my desk so I can always see them out of the corner of my eye. Every time I clap eyes on them, I remember XOXO and the wonderful impact it’s had on me and how grateful I am for the festival and community that grew up around it. They’re a small dose of self-care always in easy reach.

And then came the first true obstacle of XOXO: talking to people. 

In most situations, I am a pretty outgoing extrovert who has no problem talking about what I do for a living or making casual conversation. Something about being at XOXO always sets off my anxiety though and I become incredibly, cripplingly shy. I don’t know if it’s that there are so many awesome people doing all the things I want to be doing, if it’s that introducing myself means talking about my own personal projects (which I have a lot of insecurity about), or if it’s just feeling out of my element, but I find it hard to walk up to people and say Hello! at XOXO. 

Thankfully, XOXO is also a place where everyone is also feeling some combination of one or more of those feelings, and everyone is incredibly open to trying and connecting and being warm and open. You can often join a group and they will make space for you and include you in their conversation and happily introduce themselves to you! And that was mainly my strategy the first day of XOXO, find a group who was talking about something interesting and join in. 

On a Dark, Dark Road

This XOXO was the first time I would be talking publicly about my new, in-development tabletop role-playing game On a Dark, Dark Road. To be honest, I didn’t actually expect that I would be sharing anything about it; at previous XOXO’s, I didn’t have many conversations about what I or other people were actively working on, mainly talking about how we felt about the festival and talks. This year though, one of the first things someone asked me was about my project.

Over the course of the day, I realized pretty quickly that On a Dark, Dark Road is a weird thing that I have to practice talking about. It’s a game about how we process the death of someone we love and how those feelings can angrily manifest in our present lives. In the first three times I talked about it, someone in the group who was listening shared that they had recently lost someone. I quickly started including a content warning before I would share anything about it, and that helped a lot to set expectations and not inadvertently trigger anyone as I had done at least once that day. 

But the other thing that surprised me was that people were genuinely interested in and excited about this weird, hard little game that I was working on. Many people asked how they could follow the development of it or when they might have a chance to play it. I have a really hard time seeing the worth in the things that I do creatively, regularly questioning the validity of what I make and why I do it. 

On a Dark, Dark Road is a project that was made possible in part because of my experiences from XOXO last year. To have the community so wholeheartedly embrace not just the concept of the game, but to validate the importance of the weird and hard things it’s trying to explore… That was such a touching and powerful feeling. It meant so much to me.

For the Queen

One of my goals from XOXO last year was to play games with Alex Roberts, creator of one of my favorite games of 2018 Star Crossed. While I didn’t get to play her game of forbidden love with her, she did invite me to try out a demo of her new game For The Queen. This year I brought the finished version and introduced it to new players. We had a wonderful story of an animal-loving queen that took a dark turn at the end. It was a wonderful little moment for me to bring that experience full circle and introduce more people to Alex’s wonderful work. 

Opening Party, the Rooftop Bar, and Energy as a Limited Resource

By the end of the night, I had talked with many people and heard about all the awesome things they were working on. I ate at the food pod provided by the festival, a collection of some of Portland’s favorite food trucks run by a cadre of diverse local talent doing exciting things in the food space. I had a delicious steak crepe and a churro ice cream sundae as I milled around  talking with people I knew from previous years, people I had met on slack, and people I had never met before. It was very fun, but I was also running out of steam. The rooftop bar at Revolution Hall became a bit of an escape for me to go and have a drink and disconnect for a bit. 

One of the big battles for me this year was a near-constant low-grade anxiety permeating everything I did. There were only a few instances where this anxiety let up and allowed me to be my freest self, but otherwise I had to pretty carefully ration my energy and make sure I was taking enough time away from people to be present with them. I found opportunities to do this whenever I could, sneaking off to a bar for a quiet solo drink or sitting in a cafe and journalling over a cup of tea (oh my god, I drank so much tea). 

I eventually made it back to the hotel room and crashed out. This year, I shared a room with some festival attendees that I hadn’t met before and they were both so great and I really appreciate how easy it was to share space with them. I’ve had some pretty bad room-sharing experiences and was nervous to share with people I didn’t know, but both the ladies I shared space with were really chill and made the whole experience easy. I should have known that XO’ers would be the best people to share with.

XOXO Day Two

Day Two of XOXO is interesting because the Conference doesn’t actually start until the next day. What you do instead is hop all over Southeast Portland attending pre-planned meetups based around self-organized channels from the XOXO Slack Community. I’d lucked out in previous years that each of the meetups I wanted to attend fell in discreet time blocks and I didn’t have to dash from one place to the next. That was not the case this year! 

Many of the meetups I wanted to attend overlapped and had at least a 10–15 minute walk between then. I was infinitely thankful for Tamas’ work in porting the schedule of meetups into a calendar I could then hack away at until I had my ideal game plan. I locked in five socials that I would attend and when I’d have to leave to optimize time at each of them.

Patreon Meetup

The first meetup I attended was the Patreon Meetup. This was put together by a team of Patreon employees who were also attending XOXO. It was scheduled at the headquarters of Steven Smith Teamaker, and tbh, that was half the reason I wanted to go. The location was amazing, and you could watch as tea was bagged and packed in the facilities at the back of the shopfront. I knew that in order to get through XOXO, I would need to remain highly caffeinated, despite the hit I’d take on the anxious jitters, so I ordered a “Tableside Service for Two” of their Exceptional Black (that’s literally what it was called, and it lived up to the title). I, of course, drank all of it myself in an hour.

One of the other attendees at the meetup was Lucy Bellwood, whom I had seen speak at the 2016 XOXO Festival. Her talk was an especially candid and impactful talk about the realities of living a “successful creative life” while still subsisting on side-jobs and hustle. It was my favorite talk from that year, but I’d never reached out to tell her that. Lucy was also talking about her Boat Gnome Mercantile project, in which she would trade you a pin and card for a shell, a bit of sea glass, your favorite nautical poem, or a labelled knot of some kind. 

In a bit of a hurry, I scrawled out a copy of a poem I had written a few years back called Seashells. When I presented it to her for trade, I also got a chance to tell her what her talk had meant to me and thank her for how candid she was. As I type this up now, I am realizing that she’s now one of only three people who have a copy of a poem I wrote. Pretty much any poem I’ve put out, I’ve deleted or hidden. Only a few people have access to written copies that I can’t take back and now she’s one of them. That is a strange feeling, as I am still weird and insecure about anything I make. But that’s what XOXO is about: being insecure and vulnerable and people accepting what you have to offer anyway. 

Writing Meetup

I left Patreon halfway through to hustle over to Base Camp Brewing for the Writing meetup. Technically, this one was a mashup of writing, book club, and comics, so the group was big! It was already in full swing, so I bounced around from conversation to conversation. The crossover in subject matter and medium meant that there were people working on all kinds of cool projects, including comics, poetry, and zines. There was a point where people went around and talked about what they’d brought and were sharing. I wish that there had been a bit more opportunity to talk about practice and craft, but I was there a relatively short time. 

Anxiety Meetup

After an hour at the Writing meetup, I hustled over to Tea Chai Té for the Anxiety meetup. As I mentioned, the meetups at XOXO are structured around interest based on our slack channels, one of which is the anxiety channel. This channel is a place to go and share anxious thoughts and feelings and be acknowledged and supported. The meetup was a little bit of that, a little bit of having a chill environment to recharge. Ashur and Emily Cabrera brought a button-maker and supplies, which allowed us to create our own buttons if we felt like we needed something to engage with that wasn’t social. After an hour and a lot more black tea, I headed out with a new handmade button on my lanyard.

Zines Meetup

Next on the agenda was the zines meetup, which was a meet-and-greet of people sharing their zines and talking about making zines. My energy was starting to flag here, so I had a glass of wine and some bread to tide me over. While I was replenishing, I had the chance to connect with Eric Mersmann, a game designer I’d connected with on Twitter previously and got to meet in-person for the first time at XOXO. He gifted me a copy of his live action role playing game My Jam, and it looks beautiful! I also chatted with Nathan Harrison, who makes the Forking Paths RPG zine, which I have been eying for quite a while. I picked up a few other zines as well, building up a nice stack to read once I got back home.

Cocktails Meetup

I started to flag a bit by this point in the day, and after a while slipped away to the next meetup. A short walk later, I arrived at Scotch Lodge, a hidden-away little lounge that served the most delicious mixed drinks. I ran into some people I’d met last year, Vishna and Jason, whom I had the pleasure to play Bluebeard’s Bride with at tabletop. We ended up chatting about the history end evolution of tarot as a divination form for about an hour. 

As a side note, my experience with tarot and astrology actually ended up being a wonderful conversation starter multiple times throughout the festival. From my first conversations all the way through the end of the last night, I connected with so many people around tarot and astrology, and being able to share my knowledge and experience on topics that I knew a lot about felt like such a relief and provided a welcome respite from the general feelings of anxiety and impostor syndrome that continued to plague me through most of the festival. 

With a last toast, we ended social and trekked our way back to Revolution Hall for the final event of the night.

Video, Arcade, & Tabletop

XOXO shares a wide variety of up-and-coming content that crosses many media. The first night, there was a wide selection of new and in-development video and tabletop games to try out. Some standouts for me were: 

• Rosenstrasse, an immersive historical role-playing game that explores marriages between Jewish and “Aryan” Germans in Berlin between 1933 and 1943.
• Mutazione, a video game where you play a girl who arrives in the mysterious community of Mutazione to care for her ailing grandfather, discovering scenic hangouts, magical gardens, new friends, and old secrets. 
• Reigns, The Council, a card game based on the popular mobile game about a monarch seeking harmony in their realm, and their advisors vying to influence them for their own goals.

I was tired pretty early after such a long day of running around, so I headed back to the hotel by around 10PM to crash out. 

XOXO, Day Three

My third day in Portland was the official start of the conference talks. Every year, the XOXO organizers bring together an eclectic mix of speakers to talk about their work, their creative practice, and how they overcome many of the unique hardships that go hand-in-hand with living on the internet. Some months after the festival itself, XOXO makes available recordings of the talks. Since that’s the case, I won’t summarize the talks themselves, but instead touch on some prevalent themes and what they meant to me.

Speakers at the first conference day included: 

• Tracy Clayton, Netflix’s Strong Black Legends 
• Emma Kinema, Game Workers Unite 
• Harry Brewis aka “Hbomberguy” of YouTube renown 
• Hundred Rabbits, the creative sailing duo
• Black Belt Eagle Scout, radical indigenous queer feminist musician
• Soleil Ho, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Restaurant Critic
• Caitlin Doughty, creator of the “Ask A Mortician” series on YouTube

The morning talks were all characterized strongly of the various cruelties and difficulties that come with living online, working online, and being present in a space that is becoming increasingly radicalized. Tracy shared her struggles with depression and her techniques to cope with it in the face of tough times in the upheaval of her career. Emma shared experiences working with grassroots organizing in the video games industry and how sharing pain can be a healing and galvanizing experience. Harry Brewis talked about how something small quickly swelled into a huge and beautiful testament of how people can come together to embrace and support marginalized peoples.

The mid-afternoon talks by Hundred Rabbits and Black Belt Eagle Scout were interesting as the artists meditated on how their lives have influenced their art and how they had to embrace their unique experiences to create something that spoke to them.

Soleil Ho gave an amazing talk about what happens when you become the representation you were looking for in an industry, and dealing with the pressures and new challenges of existing as a marginalized individual on a very public level. 

Caitlin Doughty’s talk about how she worked her way to where she was now was at times hilarious, but ultimately came down to a beautiful dedication to her ideals. This quote in particular is amazing:

I’m naturally an introvert. But at a certain point, what I believed and what I advocated for became more important than the desire for privacy or the fear of being judged.

Caitlin Doughty, XOXO 2019 Talk

One of the big takeaways from the first day’s talks was that in a time of increasing uncertainty, it’s important to build communities to support us and share the burden. No one person can shoulder it all alone, and we need to come together as best we can to carry the weight together. Another big theme was just how hard but necessary it is to strike out on an unfamiliar path and put yourself in the line of something new and unexplored. By doing things that felt scary and impossible to predict the outcome, these people found growth and joy that outweighed the anxiety they went through to get there.

Another aspect of the day that was important to note is that as I was listening to the talks, I worked on a hack of For The Queen that had occurred to me on the bus the night before. In the course of the day, I wrote up a draft of a supernatural teen romance version of the game I’m tentatively calling For The Mortal. It is inspired by my love for The Vampire Diaries, Monsterhearts, and the messy lives of teenagers trapped in codependent relationships. I’m going to have a playable draft of it out by the end of the week.

Evening Events and a Surprise Validation

Once the talks had ended, there was a two hour block until the evening events started. In true XOXO fashion, I hopped on the slack to see who wanted to eat where and ended up heading to Marukin Ramen to meet up with some XO’ers looking for something warm in the sudden rain. 

After dinner, I stumbled across Eric, and he was with Nicole He and Strix Beltran. Last year, my other goal was to play Bluebeard’s Bride with Strix, as she is one of the three cowriters of the game. Not only did I get a chance to play with her, but she also kindly let me ask her lots of questions about how Bluebeard’s Bride came to be, what the process for creating it looked like, and how she brought her deep academic understanding of psychology into the project. Talking with her was one of the things that let me even entertain the idea that I could make something like On a Dark, Dark Road. 

They were talking animatedly and I almost walked by; again, that anxiety about inserting myself into other people’s spaces. But in the spirit of XOXO (and knowing full-well I would never have forgiven myself), I made my way over. I reintroduced myself and told Strix how meeting her last year inspired me to work on my own game. I assumed she would have politely acknowledged my efforts and I would have been on my way. 

But when I told her, she got so genuinely excited for me and wanted to hear all about it. If the real care and support of my fellow XO’ers wasn’t already enough to sooth my impostor syndrome as I tried working through this game, having this kind of acknowledgement of my efforts from someone I reverently look up to was intensely validating. Her work is a huge inspiration for me and to have her be excited for something I was doing, it was overwhelming in the best way possible.

Story, the Podcast Showcase

After what was quite frankly an elating experience, I watched the two final acts of the Story showcase. Like the Arcade and Tabletop tracks, XOXO lines up an evening of live podcast performances that run the gamut of subject matter. 

I arrived just in time to see a performance of The Allusionist, by Helen Zaltzman. This quirky exploration of the English language focused on the history of gendered titles such as Miss, Ms., and Mrs., as well as a brief exploration on the singular They. It was funny, informative, and exactly the kind of thing I love to see. I had not heard of the podcast before, but I definitely subscribed after.

The last performance of the night was an extended episode of Punch Up the Jam, by Miel Bredouw and Demi Adejuyigbe, with guest stars Open Mike Eagle and Neil Cicieriga. They covered the popular tune Ghostbusters, diving deep into how it came into being, the controversies that have surrounded the song, and the various legal disputes that have arisen in its history. There was also a 30 minute long interlude on ghost sex. It was hilarious and amazing and there really it no other way to describe it. 

After a very late night, I headed back to the hotel and crashed out once again.

XOXO, Day Four

The final day of the festival arrived rainy and overcast. By this point, my extrovert battery was running pretty low and I spent most of the morning alone, journaling and shoring myself up for the day ahead. I had breakfast at Meat Cheese Bread on recommendation of the slack, and lo and behold, they served their breakfast burritos with a green chile salsa made from real Hatch green chile! Combine that with more high-quality tea (this city has never even heard of Liptons, and I am forever grateful), and I was ready to get to another day of talks!

The second day of talks featured an eclectic lineup of speakers, including:

• Jahkara J. Smith, of the Youtube channel Sailor J, and now acting in television and movies.
• Emily & Amelia Nagoski, co-authors of Burnout: The Secret To Unlocking The Stress Cycle.
• Lindsay Ellis, creator of thoughtful and in-depth video essays about film criticism
• Mikki Kendall, cultural critic and author of two upcoming books
• Left At London, indie pop artist and poet
• Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
• Rhea Butcher, comic, actor, writer, and co-creator of TV series Take My Wife

Of all the speakers at XOXO, it’s no secret that I was most excited to hear Jahkara J. Smith speak. Her satirical makeup tutorials are a consistent comfort that I return to frequently, and her work to raise up marginalized voices on social media is continuously admirable. Her talk was amazing, full of biting truthfulness and vulnerable sincerity. She talked about how important it is to pick each other up and support each other, how valuable it is to create a community to rely on, and how much we need to help each other grow. A stand-out talk.

Emily & Amelia Nagoski co-presented about the various ways in which stress manifested in their lives and how they learned to work through it independently and help each other when they needed it.

Lindsay Ellis gave an amazing and deeply personal talk about suffering through a vicious alt-right attack and the techniques they used against her. She talked about how people inside of and outside of her communities worked to spread good and support her. This quote especially was so significant:

There is nothing more isolating than being targeted.  That’s it’s whole purpose: to isolate you and make you toxic to your colleagues so they don’t want to touch you for fear it will stick to them.

Lindsay Ellis, XOXO 2019 Talk

Mikki Kendall shared her own systems that she has built up over time to deal with the ways in which the internet often acts to silence marginalized voices.

Left At London, the stage name of Nat Puff, talked about finding her way to music after a career as a vine star, and the hard work that has gone into changing the the things she’s known for toward the things she loves doing.

Jenny Odell gave a great talk on her relationship with her book How to Do Nothing post-publication and the tenuous ways in which having to advertise the book has challenged her practices that resulted in the book in the first place.

Finally, the evening closed with Rhea Butcher, who gave a humorous and introspective talk/standup routine on how they had grown comfortable with the ways the world perceives them and how they had gradually worked into the use of they/them pronouns.

The subjects and themes of the Sunday talks were more broad and diffuse than Saturday, but the ones that felt especially valuable were still centered on community, how we protect each other, and how we create safer spaces for people to explore themselves and make the work they need to be making. 

Dinner with an Old Friend

I have a friend who is the reason I even know about XOXO to begin with. We met when I first moved to Albuquerque, and we were only friends for a short time before we needed to part ways. When I went to my first XOXO in 2016, I met this friend again and we started rebuilding a connection. Since then, we’ve met up and had a meal every time we’re both at XOXO, and we did the same thing on the last night of the festival. 

We went to Screen Door, a southern food restaurant a bit further afield of the XOXO bubble. Over a meal in which we ordered way too much food, we caught up on our lives and checked in on what had happened in the past year. It was nice to be able to spend time with this person, to see how things were different now and how we related to each other in ways that weren’t informed by our past falling out.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love, gave a definition of soul mates once that this person always reminds me of. You can read the full bit here, but to paraphrase: a soul mate is someone who comes into your life and shows you what you still need to figure out about yourself, the directions in which you still need to grow, and then leaves because being around someone like that all the time would destroy you. 

Every time I meet this friend, I think of that quote. I am forever changed (for the better) because of this person, but I don’t think I could ever spend more than a weekend in their presence. I appreciate the moments in which our paths can cross and then I appreciate that we can move on again until the next time we find ourselves in the same city.

Closing Party, or The Famous Internet People are Singing

After the talks are done and everyone returns to Revolution Hall, it’s time for the closing party. This year, the organizers erected a karaoke stage in the main tent and everyone piled in for a night of amazing performances. The wonderful thing about XOXO is that karaoke brings everyone together. The stage was regularly shared between attendees and speakers, and it was fantastic to see the spontaneous duets and the astounding talent. By the time the principle organizers of the event, Andy Baio and Andy McMillan, shared a stage to sing Take the Long Way Home by Supertramp, I felt simultaneously totally empty and completely full. It is a surreal and marvelous feeling that defies explanation.

Post-XOXO, Traveling Home

On the morning after XOXO, I was so thoroughly depleted of all my extrovert energy that I chose to do the one thing that always recharges me: I spent three hours in a bookstore.

Annual Powell’s Pilgrimage

Powell’s City of Books is the largest used and new bookstore in the world, occupying an entire city block and housing approximately one million books. Every time I am in Portland, I always give myself plenty of time to roam its labyrinthine shelves. Bookstores calm me and help me center in ways that few other places do. I browsed and meandered for three hours, collecting myself as I collected a small stack of poetry, art, fiction, and nonfiction books to take back home. After my sojourn and with my purchases tucked into any free crevasse in my luggage, it was finally time to head home.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

I hopped on the red line and stared out the window as Portland trundled out of sight. It was at that moment that I realized I couldn’t dive into my feelings about XOXO just yet; I needed to sit a while longer with this feeling, this full stillness and let it permeate me. Once we were airborne, I read, or dozed, or wiled away the time any simple way I wanted, suffused in contentment and quiet joy. By the time a Lyft took me from the airport to my apartment, I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.

Diving into the Fullness

Writing this account of my trip has been a way to walk through all the wonderful things that happened. It helped me take stock of the things that resonated with me and the feelings I had as I felt radically vulnerable in a way I hadn’t been at previous XOXO’s. Now that I’ve catalogued it all, I’ll start to parse out that fullness, understand what made me feel that way, and identify how I can carry it the whole year through. 

Update: After a few weeks of sorting out these feelings, you can now read what I came to conclude in my follow-up post here.