The Room

Breakfast that day was a multivitamin juice and cheese and onion chips left in a bag for too long. Mostly hair. Ate them anyway.

I was supposed to be reading about the French Revolution and the separation of powers—Locke, all that foundational stuff—but it wouldn’t stick. My head kept jumping to other things: MySpace hadn’t been updated in weeks, there was another Spin City repeat on, some half-memory of a frog Ana and I had caught that felt unfinished. I got through one chapter and quit. Tomorrow was another day.

But around that same time I found 9rules. It was this web design community, probably the biggest one at that moment. Hundreds of actual sites and portfolios, people talking about design like it was the only thing that mattered. For me, it was. I’d been making things completely alone, totally convinced I was either years behind or invisible. This place made it obvious there were all these people at the exact same starting point, building things, getting seen. I joined the same day I found it.

I remember obsessively refreshing that site those first weeks, waiting for my portfolio to show up in the galleries. It never did. But I wasn’t alone in my room making things anymore, and that was the whole thing.