When I got back from Austin my roommate asked me how it was and I was sitting in bed with big headphones on, hunched over my laptop after midnight, the way I had missed. I shrugged and managed something like, “Mostly good!” and shrugged more and she went into her room and I kept writing, transcribing something from a notebook that seemed alive when I had written it, on a plane with a pen, half asleep.

She came back a few minutes later and sat on the edge of my bed and said, So how was it, really?

I pulled headphones off from around my neck, sat up in indian style so she could maybe see my shrugs more clearly (maybe she didn’t see them the first time? I thought).

It was overwhelming was what I think I told her, sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrible.

It felt like the first day of camp, or school, every day, and all the good and bad that entails. Kinda like your first day back to high school, sophomore year. You know some people and things could go either way and you’re about to find out if you got cooler over the summer. But you also have a cold. And are running off to the bathroom to send emails to a boy you like but are unsure of and if he doesn’t email you back, like, right away it probably means you’re doomed. The weather was wonderful. Austin seems great (seems).  But it’s camp and it’s not like real life and you didn’t get to see much except the lobbies of hotels and the backs of heads and the way the hotel chairs feel on your bare legs you really should have shaved last night. I’d like to go back to Austin, I tell her, I’d love to go back.

One afternoon my friend came and met me in the lobby of a fancy hotel and we sat on a fluffy couch. I was editing stories for the book. He put his face on a fluffy cushion and looked at me. “You seem down,” he said. I didn’t feel down, not really— the tumblr party was the night before and it was wonderful and fun and also sent me into a mental tailspin, a wonderful one, yes, but my head was on the fluffy couch cushion, too, after all. He said that conferences like this always felt very different than you think they will— that they feel surprisingly lonely. I hadn’t put that word to it yet, maybe because that isn’t a word that is very fun to put to things.

We left after sitting there talking about work and happy things and lots of nodding and talking about making things up as we go along and tossing the word surreal back and forth with a sincerity and enthusiasm most reserved for conferences where you spend a handful of days meeting people who know you or who you know; people who know far more than you and make you feel young and new and make you wonder how you go here. People, too, who seem to be so wrong, people who scare you with how wrong they are, and the conviction that seems to accompany this— that trying to pretend that we aren’t all making everything up as we go along is enough to make you lay one cheek on a fluffy couch cushion of a fancy hotel, tell a friend you just saw chloe sevigny walking through here and shrug and show him your sunburn and say, “Yes, here is the book, stapled together and scribbled on. I think it is good, really, and how scary is that?”

All of the postulating put forth like it isn’t That (scary) is enough to make you want to crawl home down city blocks back to your lonely hotel room; it makes you thankful for the sunglasses you haven’t worn since the last blush of fall. You can shove your conference badge into your tote bag that everyone has and makes you want to die and hide. You spend most of the weekend, actually, wanting to hide. A conference, you think. Is this okay, you wonder, or is this all of the jokes about conferences you’ve seen on television? How is this any different? How can it be?

I am new to the Internet, I want to remind everyone. I didn’t know about this thing a few years ago. I don’t know the names of all of your heroes. I’m just learning them. I like meeting people whose blogs I read on Tumblr. That’s kind of it? (***infinite shrugging***)

Every person who asks me about the book scares me, makes me want to run back to my hotel room and work on it. Instead I pat my totebag and say, “It’s right here!” while I think, How do you know me? You mean this all counted? This is all real? Real enough that everyone is here and pretending to know what they’re talking about?

I got to see people I adore and had gotten used to thinking I’d never meet a long time ago, and yet here they were. We sat at a table and drank coffee and beer and diet coke and sometimes water and I wondered what it all meant but figured I’d read the answer on someone’s blog when I got home to New York. Someone I adore asked me how my apartment was and wasn’t I in love with it and wasn’t I subletting from an artist or designer or something and wasn’t it really awesome?

I stared past his shoulder for a second, missing a beat. “Wait,” I said, “When did I tell you about that?” I tried to remember the last time I was in LA and was excited to be in the same room as him and didn’t think I even knew I was moving yet.

He laughed, amazed. “You wrote about it on your blog!”

My eyes got big and I drank out of my iced coffee and said, Oh, ha and looked away and remembered that I did things like that and he said, You are so freaked out that I brought up your blog in person, aren’t you?” and I said, “Ha. Yes,” and wondered how dumb that seemed, me in my Tumblr t-shirt at an internet conference. 

People asked me about work all weekend, shaking my hand, telling me they were happy about the book and loved my blog and then cocked their head, always, midway through our conversation, wanting to know what it was I did at Tumblr exactly. My stock answer was (and is) (dammit now everyone knows), “We’re still trying to figure that out!” and I say it like it’s a joke and it’s my way of avoiding the question, yes, because I don’t like having meta-conversations about work but also, it is true and that is what this whole industry is doing, trying to figure things out, and as dumb as some panels are and as amazing as some panels are, from make you feel alive to make you get up and leave, that’s usually the difference, I’ve found: are we admitting that this is new and wonderful and scary and we are trying to figure it out as we go along, or do we think we are special and Get It like no one else does and are here to tell you How Things Are (and if so, OMG shut up!).

I think that weekend was about realizing that people are watching you and they like you and they are looking to you for answers and you are mixed up in some of the most exciting work in the world right now but all you can really honestly do is shrug and say, “We’re still trying to figure that out!” and trust that that means something.