in my opinion

I knew if I was going to build unparty.app the way I dreamed it, I had to learn how to build it myself.

Something I learned the hard way is to never listen to people who make you feel as though you are behind. They have not lived enough yet to learn that everyone has a different journey. They have yet to learn humility. Understanding that life can and will change at the whim of all of the things we can not control.

You are not behind. Well, unless, you want to be. I think for a while I was stuck in that loop of needing to be behind. I wanted to carry a cross that I was in fact never nailed to. Stuck, I needed to feel glued in place.

In my mind, feeling glued in place, made my anger feel tolerable. Tolerable enough that I could convert it to sadness. Sadness that graduated to loneliness. Loneliness that built isolation. Isolation that gave me a shelter for fear.

Fear of being percieved is what finally pushed my feet off that sticky trap of anger. It is rather funny to me that the moments that seemed to push this project from an idea to a product had nothing to do with writing code or business and everything to do with perception.

When I started building unparty.app, I made the rookie mistake of treating the inception as the product. From the conversations I have had over the last three years with entrepreneurs, small business owners, and content creators this is a pretty common pitfall.

At the core of sharing the starting steps is intent to connect, but in my experience it unveiled a deeper desire, validation. Validation is a tricky friend indeed. If I think back to when I started the unparty.app Instagram, Substack, heck even the website itself, there was a longing for some connection. For someone to see me, see my process, see my drive, and reach out to say "lets grow together."

That grow together never came to fruition. To be fair, it is becasue I made it impossible for connection to find its way to me. I stopped reading my Instagram DMs, but I started posting rather regularly again. If you are waiting for me to make sense of this to you, there are no words I can possibly string together to offer clarity on my decision not to engage in connection on social media that does not sound selfish.

I had a fear of being perceived. The irony of naming this project unparty, was that the most consequential moments that happened during the development of the project were when I was indeed out and about with the people, partying. There were two moments over the past three years that stick out to me, that fundamentally changed the core of what I was building.

There is a part of me that wants to avoid any mention of these events because the unhealed version of myself does not want the two individuals to know that they got so deeply under my skin, but the healed version of me in fact thanks them.

2023 was awful. I had unexpectedly lost my mom in January. It changed and still is changing the way I view and exist in the world. For me, one of the toughest aspects of a death so intense is that you also lose whatever version of yourself existed before that.

Grief is the cold sister of grace. I wish I had received more grace. I wish I had known to be open to receiving grace. At the time, almost three years ago to today, I was simply just putting one foot in front of the other.

On this day in particular, a date night, turned into meeting some friends for drinks at The Eagle in Los Angeles, California. There I was inappropriately dressed in brown knit sweater, on a summer night, surrounded by men in tanks, shorts, and leather, when someone who knew of me from college approached with such familiarity that you would have thought we were friends.

His opinion of me seemed to have gotten stuck ten years ago. Granted when I think back to those days of wearing Sperry's, J.Crew, and chugging jungle juice, I can see why some might have an unfavorable opinion of me. Although if you run into me now, I might still be wearing Sperry's, a button up, and some questionably short shorts, but I digress.

The energy of the conersation shifted almost instantly once the initial pleasantries were exchanged. This man who I had not had any conversations with since 2016, somehow knew that my life was at the time shaping up to resemble the plot of Seth Rogen's 2014 film "Neighbors."

I stood there just waiting for a camera crew from Bravo to show up from behind the bar as if we were filming a scene for the Real Housewives as I was questioned about how I paid for college and ignorant commentary about my Blackness because my partner is a white dude from Ohio.

As I am writing this I can still look back and wish I would have stood up for myself in the moment. I have always been a bit polarizing, attracting the few who make it there mission in life to keep others humble. This moment for me, felt so intensly different.

So different that I went back to my apartment and just started creating whatever I could to get those feelings that that individual triggered inside of me. At the time I did not have unparty.app to use to create, so I used ChatGPT, Canva, and Instagram, to think, build, and share.

At the time, I just needed that release. I did not want to asorb what that person said to me, but I wanted to feel it. I need to feel it. Feeling has always been the best teacher for me and has informed this entire unconvential build process for me.