catharsis & closure
from a life-in-progress ✨
I spoke at ReactRally two weeks ago.
The talk was titled “take up space”, which I also gave at Outlier earlier this year and I’ll give again at beyond tellerand in Berlin this September. I gave an earlier version of the talk last year at eyeo festival. It’s a super personal, vulnerable, and emotional talk; after the eyeo version, the sound person came up to me and told me it made her cry.
At 50-minutes of non-stop emotional, it also takes a lot out of me. That’s why I’m only giving it at the three (not counting eyeo) conferences, and after those three conferences, I’m retiring the talk forever. And it’s those three because they’re my three favorite conferences in the world, each representing a community that I’m forever grateful to for having given me so much: Outlier for the data visualization community, ReactRally for the React/web community, and beyond tellerand for web and art+technology.
But what I didn’t expect was exactly how nervous I was before giving it at ReactRally. I mean, I’m always nervous before a talk. I am always so stressed, anxious, and nervous before a talk that I feel my stomach roiling and I’m on the verge of throwing up. It’s actually worrisome how much it affects me, and I’ve wondered many times if I should quit giving talks for the sake of my physical health (that’s a topic for another blog post/newsletter). But this time, there was an added anxiety.
This was the tech conference, and I have a tumultuous relationship with the tech industry. And I talk about that tumultuous relationship in my talk, about the mysoginy I’ve experienced, and the rage that still exists within me, born from deep rooted traumas. As a summary, I wrote this in my (grad school) thesis paper:
The Silicon Valley sexism I encountered was the most spectacular forms of gaslighting and undermining. By the end of my four years working full-time, I was afraid of taking up space, I would second guess myself every time I wanted to speak up in a meeting, and I had a disproportionately low opinion of my work. I had once read that being a woman or person of color in tech was like "a death by a thousand paper cuts": countless micro-aggressions, each too negligible to report, but excruciating as they added up. It resonated so perfectly it was painful.
So I’m telling a room full of people (majority men) that work in tech, how much their industry f*cked me up. I question my life decisions sometimes.
But the reason why I had asked ReactRally if I could give this talk (that mentions React absolutely 0 times btw, lol) is because I had given talks there in 2017 and 2018. And it is one of my favorite conferences in the world because it is the first tech conferences that welcomed me as a speaker. The ReactRally community embraced me, told me over and over again that my work was incredible, and gave me some of my favorite friends to this day. They’re one of the communities that helped me regain confidence in my work (even though it took years).
And also, I really really wanted a tech conference to hear all that I had to say about it.
Halfway through, I thought I had made a horrible mistake. The friends I had asked to sit in front and nod encouragingly at me weren’t smiling. The lighting was such that I couldn’t see facial expressions past the second row, and beyond that were just outlines of bodies that (to me) looked stiff. The audience was mostly silent, and they weren’t reacting to parts of the talk that I had gotten reactions at eyeo and Outlier. I thought they hated me and hated the talk.
But then I ended my talk, and the applause was immediate. And then one person stood up, then another, and then whole rows. They were giving me my first-ever standing (!!!) ovation. I legit cried on stage.
It turns out that my friends had stopped smiling because they were trying their hardest not to cry (two of them told me that they were disassociating and trying not to think too hard about what I was saying or else they’d break down crying because they were relating so hard). One of them told me she was so so glad I got up there and gave voice to what she had experienced her whole life. And I was told that the whole room was silent and still because they didn’t want to miss a single thing I was saying.
I journaled after to process, and I realized two major things about the experience.
First, that I had placed an incredible amount of trust in that audience (and that’s why I was so beyond nervous beforehand), and they returned that trust tenfold. (Though to be fair not everyone stood for the ovation, and people never really tell you if they don’t enjoy your talk—but at least I wasn’t booed off the stage or subtweeted about how bad the talk was.)
Which brings me to my second realization. My very first talk at a tech conference was at 24 years old in 2014, and I was subtweeted that I didn’t belong in the main hall. I was less polished than I’d have liked, I um’d here and there, and I stumbled through my technical explanations. If I see those kinds of tweets or Youtube comments these days, I don’t even bat an eye (“if all they’re going to concentrate on are the “um”s and “like”s instead of the quality content I’m delivering, then that’s their problem, not mine”), but at 24, I took them to heart and carried them with me for years. That’s why I memorize all of my talks, and why I’d get so unhealthily nervous before every talk—because I’m always so so (unreasonably, unnecessarily) scared of that happening again, to lose my place in the middle of a talk and make a fool of myself.
So to get that standing ovation at this tech conference that I had placed so much trust in, it felt like everything had come back full circle. It felt like the best kind of catharsis, of closure. That weight I had carried with me for years to be absolutely perfect with my talks, it felt suddenly so insignificant and inconsequential. And going forward, I’m hoping that the quality of my talks are no longer driven by this fear of failure, but just because I enjoy delivering high-quality talks. Because I’ve come to love creating something that comes deeply from my heart and performing it, and seeing the audience’s reactions and knowing that we just related so hard to each other that we forged a connection.
It also made me realize that I’ve been doing that a lot this past year, of starting or commiting myself to something (oftentimes a project) not knowing quite why I was starting it, only that I needed to do it. And in the process, I find my answers, and by the time I reach the goalpost (a show, an exhibition, a talk) I could see so clearly what it gave me:
Cartharsis, closure, healing, another step forward.
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The ReactRally talk should be published in a few weeks, I’ll make sure to send the video once it’s out! In the meanwhile, here’s the version I gave at Outlier, and my thesis which is a condensed 10-minute version of the talk.