Digital Initiative

I’ve had a lot of time to collect my thoughts lately. I may have to pore through my archives to see, but I suspect there’s been a fairly dramatic shift in tone over the last year. It’s been a rough year. I left my job and possibly my career behind to become a graduate student, and I’ve been doing freelance work in lieu of a regular job until I find something.

I’ve had a lot of time to sit and think. More accurately, I’ve had a lot of time where I don’t have specific things to think about, so my mind wanders, and it relaxes and sprawls out. At first this panicked me. It seemed like I could feel myself dulling, losing my edge. At first it seemed like a wax sculpture slowly melting, losing form and definition and identity. That last bit was the scariest.

I’m a student, but I don’t feel like one. I’m a gamer, but I’ve barely clocked ten hours in front of a game in the last two weeks. I’m a game designer, but I’ve barely done any game designing in nearly a year. I’m a romantic… who’s single. I’m… what? What’s left when all of the things I do that define me are things I’m not really doing at all? I felt my edge slipping, my shape blurring, my identity fading, and I felt like I lacked anything concrete to replace any of it with.

This loss scared me. I have a good network of close friends who I value highly, and if I’m no longer me, who exactly are they friends with? It caused me to retreat into a mask of my old self, looking for all the world like the complete upheaval going on inside was really just a minor inconvenience that would be cleared up as soon as I got a few interviews and settled in. At the same time, I was meeting new people, lots of new people, for the first time in years. Not the five minute hello-goodbye that you get at a party or out dancing, but weeks and months of classes with people, and time to get to know them. It’s been an opportunity to be an entirely different person, and it’s afforded me the opportunity to self-evaluate in a way that I haven’t since college.

At the same time, I’ve been forced to define myself by things other than what I’m currently doing, because it’s not a good measure of who I am. It’s caused me to reconsider how much I defined myself by my career and my hobbies previously. Without those as an easy reference point to let people know what (and, by extension, who) I am, I’ve had to introduce myself to people as myself, rather than as a series of labels. For all of my distaste for defining people with labels, I’ve unconsciously been doing it to myself for years.

Without any of that to hide behind, and with classes specifically tailored to rip me bodily from my shell, it’s been an intense few months (with little sign of slowing). I’m unfolding parts of my mind that haven’t been touched in a really long time, while trying to make peace with the fact that I’m just me, I’m not a gamer or a game designer or a manager or a student. I’ve done more new things in the last eight months than I did in the previous 48, and I’ve had the chance to really pore through my own thoughts.

I talked a few days ago about how I don’t trust myself. It manifests in a few ways, but a lot of it crystallized when someone pointed out to me that I’m really, really bad at taking compliments. Even when I take them, I internalize them badly. Someone tells me I’m smart and I immediately take that as both a new weight of expectation and a suggestion that I’ve miscommunicated and said too much or too little. Someone comments on how I notice things and I worry that I seem creepy. I try to be attentive, thoughtful, inclusive, open-minded, and treat others better than I would want to be treated, and only hear the times when people tell me I’ve failed at them.

I’ve struggled for a long time with having advantages that other people don’t, and trying not to call attention to them for fear that I’m “rubbing it someone’s face”. When someone gives me a compliment that I know is true, I cringe a little bit on the inside because it feels like it’s drawing attention to one of those advantages. I’ve been checking my privilege since before that was a concept, and I’ve been acutely, stomach-turningly aware of people who don’t. I’ve been trying not to come off as “too smart” or “too perceptive” or “too good at things” for years, and insisting that I’m not all that smart or perceptive or good at anything. It’s a hollow lie. I’m not perfect, but I’m a hell of a lot better than I’ve been allowing myself to take credit for.

One of the things that started happening in the first few months of my taking classes was an acute realization that I was leaving a strong impression on pretty much everyone I met, without meaning to. It scared me, because it meant that my attempts to go unnoticed were failing, and that I was affecting people unintentionally. I had somehow become the person I’d always admired, the type of person who can speak quietly in a room and have everyone turn to listen– it actually happened to me several times in a class. I could quietly, unassumingly take charge and direct a group of people into becoming a team, and it mostly happened because I thought of something and said it, and people listened and acted on it. My suggestions were treated like directives, and it terrified me.

At the end of one of my classes, I had a string of people thank me for all of my work in organizing and leading everyone. I couldn’t escape the effect I’d had on people, and I agonized over it in the interim between classes. It seemed irresponsible and dangerous to leave a strong impression on people when I didn’t intend to, and my friends, when I commented that it seemed to be happening, generally laughed and said “yeah, obviously.”

I went into my classes this quarter differently. My goal was to leave an impression on people intentionally, to play an active role in what they thought of me and why. I also had to do it without a clear sense of my own identity, and the result felt predictably scattered and chaotic, or so I thought. The feedback I got was that I felt genuine, and perceptive; insightful and analytical, if the latter to a fault at times. People were happy to have met me and I found that the thoughts I’d studiously avoided expressing were well-received and valued. I’ve since been trying to express more of those thoughts with my friends, and it’s very hard to do. My patterns of interaction feel so well defined that I’m leery of breaking from the mold, but I’ve still made little forays and have been met with encouragement.

In the meantime, I’m trying to reclaim those positive traits that I’ve turned around on myself. I’m learning Japanese, a very difficult language, and I’m going to try to take another shot at Chinese at the same time. I think I might ask my mom to start speaking to me solely in Spanish, so I can go from “can mostly understand” to “can speak”. Learning three languages, two of them notoriously difficult, at the same time is crazy. I have no idea if I can do it (and probably can’t), but damn it, I’m smart. I’m not going to find out what I can actually do without pushing my limits, and I have an opportunity right now to push my limits like crazy and see what I can actually accomplish. I’ve been trying to memorize map directions at a glance, and catch little details in everything. I’ve been striking up conversations with random people, and trying to memorize the name of everyone I meet.

I can’t yet say if this grand experiment, leaving my job and moving across the country, was a good idea. It’s still firmly in the “questionable” category from any sort of measurable standpoint, but I’ve had a lot of time and opportunity to heal and grow in ways I can’t measure. I’m a better person now than I was before I moved out here, and I think that alone makes the experiment worthwhile.

No pictures again today. Sorry. I’m exhausted.

One of my classes asked for a journal of at least 350 ideas, as a submission to go alongside the final project. The class is geared a lot more towards people who aren’t from creative backgrounds, so this assignment is a little awkward for me.

It’s strange because most of my training and education have geared me towards taking an endless font of random ideas and culling them until only the better ones survive. A mentor of mine once commented that an idea, by itself, is worth less than nothing, because the time spent thinking about it could have been used to build upon or refine an existing idea. He went on to say that ideas have no value until they’re used to create something. He encouraged us to be our own harshest critics, whittling down our ideas output until we only release ideas with legs, ones that could feasibly become something worthwhile or great.

It’s a message I’ve taken to heart. Most of the ideas that I actually communicate have had quite a bit of thought put into them, and when I suggest something off the cuff, I’m pretty quick to abandon it as well, because it’s easily replaced by a new one. It’s something that I think makes me a bit frustrating to talk to about ideas (and why I don’t often do it, despite generating them constantly)– some things I will abandon immediately, other things I have thought about at extreme length, down to the minute details, and mentally made balancing sacrifices along the way, culling any version or solution that doesn’t work. I’m not sure it’s easy to tell the difference, except that I sometimes abandon ideas suddenly.

I used to think that everyone generated ideas the way I do. It’s a constant white noise in my thoughts, little flickers of concepts both related to whatever I’m doing and unrelated to anything, and I occasionally take a mental pause and pluck a few for later consideration. I don’t necessarily consider it a good thing– it’s frequently distracting and when an actionable idea takes hold, I want to do something about it immediately, lest it get lost in the flood, but I’d thought that was how most people operated, and the few people I’ve spoken to about it (mostly creative types) tend to describe something similar. Not realizing that other people don’t operate this same way, I raised an eyebrow at an assignment to generate 350 ideas in eight weeks. It seemed like a trivial task.

What I found out from classmates was that a goodly portion of the class was agonizing over the assignment, unsure of how they would generate that many ideas in that amount of time. These are intelligent, thoughtful people, and I found it interesting that the act of coming up with raw ideas would be so difficult, and would push them beyond their comfort zones. I’d considered dropping the class before that point, but it occurred to me that the point of the assignment wasn’t to generate 350 ideas, but to push people outside of their comfort zones. Dropping the class and abandoning the activities seemed, through that lens, to be the loser’s way out. There were more creative solutions to that problem, and they’d push me past my comfort zone.

The first hurdle was talking to the professor about it. This essentially required me approaching my professor and telling him I was worried the class would be too easy for me, and asking if I could come up with ways to raise the difficulty. I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect, and wasn’t really sure what his reaction would be, but if it was a disaster I could still drop the course (was my justification). He turned out to be surprisingly interested in my ideas for pushing my own limits, and with his help I rewrote pretty much every assignment criteria to be something relevant to me. Rather than being bored all the way through the class, I was able to reconfigure things to fit me.

I gave myself an hour to generate 350 ideas, using shorthand to write them down quickly and then going back to fill them out into sentences readable by other people. It’s an idea roughly every eleven seconds for an hour. I came up with 214 in the hour, and it was a really interesting exercise. The first ten minutes or so were pretty easy, just a constant stream of things bubbling up and being written down, mostly stuff I’d already been thinking about and putting on paper for the first time. Once that font of ideas was up, things got a bit more difficult. After writing down all the ideas I’d already had refined, I caught myself refining ideas before writing them down, which was slowing my pace too much. I found it surprisingly hard to actually write down unrefined, terrible ideas and wound up committing myself to writing down a bunch of intentionally bad ideas, which gave me another big chunk of the list.

By the end of the hour, I’d written down a little more than two hundred ideas, some with potential, most of them terrible, but I’d legitimately pushed my limits. 350 ideas in an hour wasn’t something I could generate, and while filling out the rest of the list over the course of the day wasn’t too terrible (I still have a few more to fill in as of this writing), there was definitely a period after the hour was up where I felt spent.

It turned out to be an interesting exercise, one that I appreciate my professor giving me the opportunity to alter the assignment parameters to pursue. I will probably try to spend some time doing high-speed idea generation to keep myself sharp, though probably not for an hour at a time. I found that coming up with lots of ideas with no specific theme or goal in mind caused me to think about things I’d been mulling over but weren’t directly related to what I was currently doing. I wound up with a lot of ideas for small projects, hobby stuff, or other things that I hadn’t put any thought into for quite a while.

If you have a few minutes to spare, try seeing how many ideas you can come up with in five or ten minutes. Put a clock on it and see where you get. You might be surprised at the outcome, or at least have a good laugh.