Whirlwind

My last blog post was over 3 weeks ago. I would be a little over a quarter way done with my RC batch by now, if not because I put it on pause. Long story short, one week into the residency, we moved. And Mengna and I understimated just how much of a toll it would take.

While speaking with Emily, a faculty facilitator, about the decision it became obvious to me that I didn’t have the bandwidth to be present with myself, my peers, and my projects. That first week and a half I was fully submerged at RC and I rediscovered just how much I missed coding and talking about programming with others. I had some of the most intellectually stimulating conversations this year in a short few days, and I got a glimpse of the type of work I want to be working on for myself and collaborating on with others.

It's hard for me not to see myself as a failure right now. A part of me believes I should have seen this coming – we were moving! At the same time, I've been making massive strides this year to step into myself, and making mistakes is a big part of that. I never thought I would be coding again, not like this, and if you told me that I would quickly be participating in one of the premiere coding communities worldwide as part of my return, I would have never believed you. Similarly, I would never have thought that I would be writing this post from a beautiful apartment, twice the size, in the same neighborhood in Brooklyn we've grown to love and call home. So, yes, in some ways I've failed at lining up two big projects. But I'm far from a failure, and I'm more prepared than ever to pick myself back up and continue in the journey of self- and life- study.

I choose to celebrate this failure and learn from it. So let's reflect a bit on what I did learn about myself in the first week and a half at Recurse Center.

One of the biggest insights that I’ve had is how hard it is for me to drop into a place to just talk about technical intrigues. Most folks at Recurse have a specific project they're trying to build, a problem to tackle, or pure interests in STEM that fuel their curiosity. Conversations revolve around mathy, scientific, and engineering topics. Yes, they do also touch on art, philosophy, and much more, but there's this shared understanding that we're all there to becoming better programmers. That requires being good at talking about programming.

It’s easy for me to speak about my intrinsic motivation to pursue projects, and to expound on the meaning and values behind my interests. When Emily asked me about what coding problems I'm running into or how my projects are going, I froze. It's like I forget my own interest in engineering topics.

For example, when I show my poem “here, still” it’s more likely that I’ll discuss the emotions and thoughts that moved me during coding and writing it. It’s exciting for me to talk about the quality of experience I meant to elicit in readers and the different ways I’ve seen people interact with it.

But in order to make the poem I had to learn a number of technical skills that are worth discussing in and of themselves. I had to build a particle system using P5.js. I watched a dozen different youtube videos about physics equations used in creative coding to simulate forces like gravity and friction. I played with obscure text-based features, mixing and matching techniques that I haven’t seen used in other places. I had to learn about and implement a quadtree, and wrestle with efficiency and optimization.

But when talking with Emily, for a split second I was afraid that I didn't know anything about coding! Or that I wasn't interested in it, which is patently absurd when I take a step back and observe my behavior. What I can confidently do is not always in lockstep with what I can confidently talk about.

My favorite principle of RC is generous learning, and it’s not one that I’m used to practicing, especially when it comes to technical aspects of my creative work. Had RC not compelled me to share what I learned technically from the poem, a lot of what I accomplished may have already been forgotten. It gives me a chance to celebrate my own process, learn from it even better, and help others learn too.

I hope to write another post on technical things I learned while I was at RC, some of what I’ve learned about moving, and some of what I’ve learned about life in the midst of this whole whirlwind.