I’ve started this post quite a few times over the past two weeks. This particular attempt is being composed at my favorite ramen shop as I sip on sake and wait for my meal. The smell of ramen and fried pork fills the air and a warmth is already spreading through my empty belly. 

This post is called “Diving into the Fullness” because for the last two weeks, I’ve felt incredibly full off the experience I had in Portland at XOXO. I tried so many times to encapsulate those feelings, hammer them into words that would help me remember those feelings and put them to good use, use them to battle my own inertia and fear of losing it. That’s a heck of a lot of pressure for a blog post.

No one would ever accuse me of taking the path of least resistance; in fact, if I don’t seemingly choose the most difficult way to do something, it’s apparently not worth doing. So I’m trying to change tack: no more maudlin backstories, no more attempts at the long form essay that encapsulate depression and personal growth and trying and trying and trying. Instead, I’m going to talk about why I feel so full and what I can do to keep that feeling going even as the year moves on.

Here’s what I learned at XOXO:

I do not need to feel like an artist to make art. 

I’ve grappled for a long time with the feeling that I wasn’t “an artist” because I didn’t make art. Simultaneously, I have been reticent to make art because I didn’t yet “feel like an artist”. I’ve taken a very long, meandering road to finally accept a core truth: I am a person, not a collection of titles.

I do not do something and therefore become it, nor am I something and therefore do it. I am a person and I do the things I want to do. I am a person who writes, draws, makes games. I am not a writer or a poet or an artist or a game maker, nor even a project manager or community organizer; I just do all those things. 

This is tough for me because I have spent practically my entire life trying to define who I am, trying to understand what makes me as I am. Even as I have incredibly fraught relationships with titles like “artist” and “poet”, I wholly embrace titles like “project manager” and “community organizer”. But those titles are not me; they are things that I do. So I’m going to work on my need to label everything about myself and embrace just doing.

I need to have people who validate my work.

I’m lucky to have a wide network of people who care about me and want me to succeed. But having people caring about you and wanting you to succeed is different from people who care about your work and want that to succeed. You need both.

One of the most surreal experiences I had at XOXO was the way so many people validated the worth of a game like On a Dark, Dark Road. They weren’t supporting me, per se; they cared about this thing I was making. That was a radical departure from my friends at home who are eternally supportive of me, but who maybe don’t care about what I’m making. 

I didn’t realize that was missing until people gave it to me. To be honest, as I was considering abandoning the project. I didn’t feel like I was making traction on it and I felt more and more like no one would even care if I did. To have people tell me that the game was important on its own merit… It changed my outlook completely. You need to have people who see the value in what you do, not just care about you.

I need to share physical space with like-minded people.

I debated not going to XOXO this year. I’d been twice and had felt increasingly despairing of the fact that 2018 hadn’t “fixed me” of my insecurities. I also heavily considered the feeling that I felt I was taking up space that would have better served someone else. But when I got through the lottery, I decided within minutes that I would go. Because I needed to; because a part of me realized something that I hadn’t articulated out loud until I started this post. 

I think we as people need to be around a community that shows radical care for one another. Going to XOXO is like going to a place where you feel you belong (even when you are filled with anxiety about not belonging). Being in a place where people are practicing kindness and openness in a way that doesn’t feel self-serving or laced with ulterior motives feels liberating. 

As much as I like to believe I can make it on my own and that I don’t need anything from anyone else, I’ve learned that I am indeed human and do require community and companionship. XOXO is a place where I feel like people give that freely, where they let their guard down and are willing to embrace you where you are, as you are. Every time I return from XOXO, I regularly joke that I’m going to move to Portland immediately. It’s not the city I’ve fallen in love with: it’s the community and the people I met there.

My mission now is to start building those radically caring and open communities in my own spaces. I think XOXO has done an amazing job of building that at the festival and on the internet; but while the slack is a constant refuge for me, it’s not quite the same as moving into the friendliest neighborhood in the city. And until the Andy’s builds their own XOXO commune, the next best thing is getting on the ground and doing it myself where I am.

I need to see a wide range of work unrelated to my own.

Being at XOXO and talking to the attendees, the speakers, and the presenters, I saw a lot of work that is radically different from anything I do. Medium, scale, purpose, so many different projects setting out to do different things. It pushed me to think about things in new and unusual ways. I consume a lot of media, be it movies and tv, music, news, podcasts, whatever, but it all passes through a carefully curated filter where I’m only actively partaking in the things that I know will bring me joy.

Being at XOXO and having a wide and diverse menu of media to choose from, I can’t help but be pushed outside my bubble more and more every time I go. I listened to podcasts I’d probably have skipped on my own, I played board games I definitely never would have made time for otherwise. and I listened to speakers I never would have heard about on my own. All this new and unusual stimulus fired off my brain in unexpected ways. I could make sense of things I hadn’t considered before. 

It gives me new perspectives to interrogate the things I love and learn more deeply why I love them. It allows me to see things in new ways and grapple with different schools of thought. The things I make after that influx of new and unrelated material is always more textural and nuanced than when I create for a long time in the vacuum of my own lenses and filters. So I want to continue bringing unexpected and unrelated work into my life, if only selfishly to see how it affects what I make.

I need to devise strategies that make starting as easy as possible. 

One of the things that came up more than a few times at XOXO was how to have a consistent creative practice. I’ve been working on my own strategies for this and there are two things that have helped me immensely. 

Strategy One: Take 20 minutes. 

Starting is one of the hardest things for me. I build up a well of anxiety about doing the thing that it becomes nigh impossible to get around to doing the thing. One of the techniques I’ve used to ease myself into creative work is to just do something for 20 minutes. 

I recently bought a sand timer from Target that counts down for twenty minutes. When I turn the timer over, I immediately start doing whatever it is I want to be doing. I like the sand timer because anytime my attention wanders, I can look at it and see it’s still counting down, but I have no real conception of how much or how little time has passed. I also like the sand timer because it doesn’t announce when it’s done like a timer on my phone or computer does. As I’m working, one of two things will happen: 

The first and more likely occurrence is that after a few minutes, I will get into the flow of whatever I’m doing and the timer won’t matter. I’ve looked up from my work sometimes to see the timer run completely out and that I’ve been working for an hour or more. In these situations, I can happily return to my work without distraction because I’m already doing it.

The other possibility is that I will slave away for twenty minutes and then allow myself to be done. Sometimes I just can’t get into the flow of the work. Maybe I’ve had a long day or I haven’t eaten properly or I’ve got anxiety about something. Sometimes you just can’t work on something even if you want to. If I start the timer, work for 20 minutes, and then realize that I can’t get any more done, I allow myself to step back. I’ve done what I could for the day, and trying consistently is more important than getting a win every time. I’ll just try again tomorrow knowing that I made an attempt rather than feeling bad for not trying at all.

Strategy Two: Take the pressure off. 

Lately the first thing I write on the page when I start my timer is the same five words: “this is not a poem.” Those words are immensely freeing. Right out the gate, I’m telling myself that this thing is not A Poem™ and that I don’t need to worry about it being perfect. I don’t even need to worry about it being particularly good because it is not a poem. It’s a warm-up, a stream of consciousness, a way to get the pen moving.

When I was young, anything academic came easily to me. I had the highest grades in my class and knew the answer to every question asked by the teacher. I read the textbook cover to cover and knew all the states and their capitals. I could balance any equation and knew how to spell “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”. Everything was easy and I was good at everything. As with many studious children who were quick learners, things got harder over the years and I didn’t quite know how to cope.

I’ve spent many years of my adult life unlearning the bad habits I built as a perfectionist child and teenager. One of the hardest lessons I still grapple with is giving myself permission not to be perfect and (in the astute words of Anne Lamott) that it’s okay to write shitty first drafts. “This is not a poem” is one of the ways I allow myself to make something messy, something that’s not as good as I expect it to be. “This is not a poem” means I can write something bad so that afterwards I can hopefully write something good. 

Strategy Three: Set small deliverables.

Perhaps it comes from my history as a graphic designer, but I have always looked at my projects from the end backwards. I would imagine a beautiful book, bound and impeccably laid out. I would envision a lovely illustration, the complete work and not the lines and strokes required to make it. I would see the thing as I want it to be, evoking the feelings I want it to evoke. And I would spend very little time fantasizing about the component parts that needed to be made in order to create that stunning thing. 

Now that I manage designers, I understand the dire importance of seeing things iteratively, of building things out piece-by-piece and iterating, refining throughout. There are few things more awkward than to see someone’s self-proclaimed vision at the end and realize that it needs to be radically changed in order to achieve what it’s meant to achieve. I was doing that with my own personal projects.

Now I focus more on small deliverables. I’m not creating a zine; the zine is the final product after my 3-poem check-in, after my 6-poem check-in, after the half-dozen rounds of intermittent revisions, after editing and having external readers look them over along the way. Having a long tail of small deliverables means that I’m not starting at the far-off final thing and dreaming about how wonderful it’s going to be. Instead, I’m staring at the very near deadline and making it happen a little bit at a time. 

A conclusion of sorts.

This post ended up focusing on two main concepts: what I need to feel good enough to create and how I empower myself to create. 

For a long time, I beat myself up over the fact that I could never seem to manage a Bukowskian ideal of creating no matter the hardships (see air and light and time and space), but I’ve increasingly come to realize that I don’t believe that anymore. At least for me, there are real things I need in order to feel whole enough to make things. Maybe that means I’m not a “real artist” but as we’ve previously established, I’m working on being okay with that. 

I’m taking the steps I need in order to feel good about making again, and I’m devising strategies to help me feel like I can actually make again. It still feels so hard sometimes, and I wish constantly that it didn’t feel this stupidly, arbitrarily hard. I feel like it should be easier and I hate that it’s not. But I’ve realized that this thing matters to me too much to give up on, and I’m going to push through the hardship anyway using any dumb trick I can to make it that much easier.

Change is not a bolt of lightning that arrives with a zap. It is a bridge built brick by brick, every day, with sweat and humility and slips. It is hard work, and slow work, but it can be thrilling to watch it take shape.

—Sarah Hepola