Within me, an invincible summer

Every work day, I write a short check-in essay to the team in Slack and in the thread, we share what our daily wins, needs and emotional capacity. Today marks one year since we were forced to pivot. So I wanted to share what I wrote:

Good morning, everyone.

"As you may have heard, Austin has declared a disaster and SXSW is officially cancelled for this year so it’s now time to address the next steps..."

This is the start of every email that I sent out on March 6, 2020 to ask artists how they wanted to proceed after SXSW shut down in advance of EVERYTHING shutting down, due to COVID-19. We sunk more than $100K in a budget towards this project and SO MUCH TIME recruiting, forming relationships and trying to make it work. We were nobody, asking a bunch of somebody artists to take a risk on us and put them in nowhere venues to tour to Austin. And, despite the odds, it was working…until it all feel apart.

But somehow, after the dust settled and we took two weeks to shut down the events (and our brains), we found enough hope to move forward.

Hope is an ever-present theme this week. But I feel like people are so hesitant to call it hope. Maybe cautious optimism? Vaccines, re-openings and even notices of live shows being booked (even within Side Door’s platform) are cause for feeling that almost-forgotten swell of possibility.

Yesterday, a staff member asked about our fundraising efforts and said, “how scared should I be?” Fear has dominated our psyche in the last year, so it’s a loaded question. My response, which [my co-founder, Dan Mangan] echoed, is that we’re never not scared, being on the precipice of failure. That’s the definition of a startup. We’re never not working against the odds/clock/resources to survive.

But this fundraise, I feel different. We have actual traction, real revenue and incredibly passionate reviews of what we do. We have a team that has grown so much in this difficult time that I could cry every day with pride. We have created a world that has opened up new audiences and new possibilities for artists that may mean a very different (and hopefully easier) path for them, moving forward.

I am scared. I always am. But energy flows where attention goes. That means if I focus on the fear, I will be paralyzed. If I focus on what gives me hope, I will flourish.

I will leave you with this quote from Albert Camus (who wrote The Plague):

"In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back."

And, just a footnote: Albert Camus lived in France during and following the Nazi occupation. In 1957 he became the second youngest recipient of the Nobel prize in literature. Three years later, he died in a car crash at the age of 47.

We only have one life, folks. Choosing hope over fear will define it.