You're Not Broken: Finding Your Creative Way Through Difficult Times

[Music] so hi I'm Laurel and this is you're not broken as you can probably guess from the screen so I have a confession to make this talk was not easy for me and in fact is the minute I submitted it I had this feeling of oh god what have I done and I've spoken at GDC quite a bit but it's always about facts and metrics and design principles in fact if you've gone to my GDC talks any of them you'll know that I don't even do a bio at the front because I hate talking about myself so as I started getting ready and rehearsing this talk and I was going through the slides I got the sudden panic feeling that I'd be like three slides in and everyone would be like oh my god this lady's gonna talk about herself for an hour and I started panicking because you know I though I'd only talking about myself so I actually made a metric for you about how much I'm gonna talk about myself just so you know it's really just to illustrate what I'm gonna talk about so you know that I'm coming from somewhere where I understand what everybody is going through and so then I kept rehearsing and I was like oh god I'm gonna like five minutes in it everyone's gonna say this is the most depressing I've ever heard and everyone's gonna run away so then I worried about that and I said to a friend of mine that preparing this GDC talk about how I creativity is affected by trauma and stress is giving me trauma and stress so here's where I ended up I will pinky swear promise that I don't talk about myself any more than I have to to make my points and they're really it's not gonna be depressing in fact it's quite the opposite so stick with me through this beginning here so a little bit about my road I've been a game developer since 1994 largely and created leadership roles in fact all in creative leadership roles so we designer creative director game director VP of design that sort of stuff and a part of doing that in commercial game development means that you're effectively on the assembly line of creation and I don't mean that in a demeaning way it's not repetitive even making a sequel means making all sorts of new innovative design decisions so it's not an assembly line from that perspective but it is an assembly line from the perspective of you have to come into work every day and be reliably predictably effectively creative that is your job it's a predictable pattern and in fact it becomes the pattern of your life if your life is around making games like mine is and so it's about shipping game after game year after year that's the pattern of your life that's your road but then in 2012 my road changed I was diagnosed with stage four head neck cancer so side note that little bit at the bottom there that says p16 positive that means it's cos beta HPV virus if you have kids you have family have kids you ever plan to have kids you know any kids get those kids vaccinated against HPV do not hesitate to do that so suddenly I'm on a road that feels a little bit different it feels less certain it feels darker I know it's destination all of a sudden feels unclear the rhythm of my life was totally disrupted but as anyone who's dealt with cancer before knows you immediately go into a different kind of pattern [Music] that was my radiation song I listen to it every day when I'd rode radiation for seven weeks I had chemo every week along with that that's the standard treatment for head and neck cancer so seven weeks doesn't sound like a long time but it takes like eight months to a year to recover from head and neck cancer treatment because it's one of the worst cancer treatments the combination of the chemo making you ill and the radiation to your esophagus means you literally can't eat you have a stomach tube you're on fentanyl patches it's not great so it takes a while to get over it I worked from home during that time and it seems like it took forever but I noticed something about my ability to work and it wasn't just because sometimes I was sick when I was working and it was something about like planning or meetings or leadership stuff I was largely okay you know I was a little slower than normal because I wasn't feeling well I had to focus a little bit more but it was normal you know mostly fine but when it came up with or when it came to creative decisions or creating a new story or designing a new system nope that assembly honor what assembly line was not just broken it was gone it was an empty factory that was it and so there was this not six month period where I couldn't do what had really defined me for most of my life and I started to wonder did I was I able to do this before how was I able to do this one of the things that was lucky in that circumstance was I could hang in on something called chemo brain which I'm going to talk about more in a minute but it was a principle that was kind of new at the time I went through the first cancer for how chemo actually affected the brains of people going through it so when you go through cancer you go into that post cancer cycle regular scans every three months every six months then every year if I got to the three-year mark without the cancer returning it there was a 99% chance it would never come back so I'm crawling out of the hole getting back to the pattern of my life I'm back on the road again and I hit that three-year mark but they're learning more and more about HPV related cancer all the time so 2015 back again this time it's in my lungs stage 3b very close to stage four so now this road is different again especially since in my situation I lost both grandfather's to lung cancer about two weeks apart I had lost my uncle colon cancer in 2012 when I was dealing with cancer and my mom had died of lung cancer a year before so this was not awesome to say the least and you don't have much time to think about it because you know here we go again so I was a rare case of going through primary chemo treatment twice they don't usually do that they did in my case because they wanted to treat it as a new primary and because I was so young for a cancer patient so here I am going through chemo again working from home again this feels familiar I know what this is like well actually I kind of didn't because it took me longer to recover this time even though lung cancer treatment is way easier than a head neck cancer treatment I mean I was like is it because I'm a like three years older and my weaker cuz I went through this before I just could not be creative I couldn't do my job I didn't feel like myself at all and in fact there's one moment that I'll never forget we're sorry if I get emotional i sat on the couch and I said to my husband I am a talentless hack and I meant it in that moment and I thought I had always been a hack and I would always be a hack and I would never create ever again and I meant it so now I'm back in the cycle right you're doing the scans I'm cancer-free I'm back on the road again my roads changing every time I get back on it because I'm changing but there was this moment of recognition where I thought I've been here and I've come out of this and I'm coming out of it again and I'm learning something and I want to understand what it is that I'm learning cuz I'm a designer I look for patterns right that's how I look at life I want to understand this pattern so six months in is back again it's blooming in both lungs and this time I get a special new word attached to it which is incurable so that's a new experience and this is a totally new road and unlike the other roads I mean it sure feels dark but where it's different is I absolutely do know the destination of this one metastatic lung cancer returns after treatment not a lot you do don't have a lot of time so spoiler alert I'm not gonna die on stage I promise you well I mean I guess the building could collapse or something I'm not gonna die cancer on stage I promise in fact I feel really good about this month this year pretty much not gonna die this year feel great about next year - pretty much I'll talking about that a little bit more at the end but I didn't wanna do this whole thing with you feeling like I have death there's like behind me with his scythe over the back of my neck it's it's not quite like that so all of this is happening as we in America go through a presidential election which is super fun so I'm not gonna get political but I will say most of my friends were not pleased with the output of the election and in fact some of them were devastated so it's the day after literally the day after and I'm on Facebook and Skype and slack and Twitter I'm talking about a way forward I'm talking about the future and I had a friend say to me how is it possible that you are able to be like this because I know the election results rec to you how is that they were able to do this and I thought about it for a minute and I said honestly well I guess I've developed some tools for dealing with bad news and you know I realized in that moment I had right and it wasn't just for dealing with bad news it was navigational tools to help me find my way back to the person that I was which is a creative person to find my way back to the ability to be creative again and so that's why I'm here despite not liking to talk about myself because I know I'm not alone I've seen other developers try to power through hardship and personal tragedy things like Devore bankruptcy along terms of unemployment losing a spouse losing a child isn't apparent I've watched it damage and end careers and it's not like what we do is not already hard enough so when you take the stress that we're already under and you add that stress and then you feel like you can't create like you're completely blocked and you blame yourself you're crushing your own self-worth and and we don't need to do that to ourselves we need to find a way forward so I believe that so strongly that I'm up here talking about how I've learned to get through difficult times I want to share what I've learned and because you know I'm a designer and that's way look at the world I've got steps so I'm going to talk about the six steps that I found effective to get through difficult times and regain your creative so step number one recognize and acknowledge what's happening to you so again I had the advantage chemo-brain which by the second time I went to radiation and chemo there were books about it because it was being recognized so much here are the symptoms of chemo brain things like being unusually disorganized difficulty concentrating finding the right word learning new skills multitasking it's short attention span short term memory problems taking longer than usual to complete routine tasks trouble with verbal and visual memory do they sound familiar if you've been through a time of trauma and in fact the second time through I'm a compulsive researcher by the way so I spend ridiculous hours researching cancer every time I go through it so and that's three times now so a lot of research so I liked this quote that I started seeing when I was going through chemo the second time for many sources of data we now know patients experience impairments not just after chemo but after surgery radiation hormonal therapy and other treatments and I started thinking maybe it's not just the treatment maybe that makes it worse cause you're sick but maybe it's just exacerbating something that would happen anyway after you get diagnosed with cancer because getting donuts with cancer right it's super traumatic you have to tell your friends you don't know what's gonna happen it's awful right so maybe actually it's not chemo brain maybe it's trauma brain right maybe this is a common experience and that's when I started thinking about all of my friends who had been through some of the triggers of emotional distress so yeah very I'm under health that's me although honestly like everybody who's who is has lived I've been through other things right divorce lots of a spouse loss of a child loss of a parent moving we look at employment all of these things bankruptcy having your house we're closed all of these things cause us distress and when you're in those times of a stress you feel fundamentally lost and broken from a creative perspective because you can't set aside those strong emotions like fear and sadness and worry and anger those the emotions that make us feel broken if you feel broken your creative work is broken and so making great games and being creative means we have make ourselves whole again so we know it kind of sounds a dumb when I say you have to recognize what's going on and this is where you feel like I don't have to recognize that my mom just died because my mom just died I know that that happened but that's what I'm saying acknowledging the fact that something happened is not the same as acknowledged and then it had a profound effect on you or understanding what that fact effect is and in fact we pride ourselves on being logical people in game development but the nature of this situation that you're in Rob's you of your objectivity so even the second time through I didn't understand what was happening to me sitting on the couch talentless hack that was the second round of chemo not the first and even still I didn't understand what was happening to me we're all here because we have what it takes to make it in game development it's a super competitive and demanding field we got here they made tougher and stronger and pushing through so we feel like we should be able to do that for all of our problems in life and is especially bad for us our careers up in the center of our life we've learned that if we focus we can shut everything else out if we focus on the problems we're trying to solve creatively but trauma doesn't work that way in fact it's the opposite trauma completely robs you of the ability to focus on anything but the trauma so if you look at these again chemo brain these are actually some signs that you're responding to a stressful situation you need to be aware of these signs in yourself and recognize them when you see them other creative symptoms to be on the watch for when your thoughts just don't flow the the blank sheet of paper is the worst anyway I hate it it's always a struggle but when you're in this situation you just can't like you're just blocked you're stopped and nothing seems to flow at all except thinking about the terrible thing that flows boy that's all you can think about and you can't stop it I'm going to talk about that in a minute how to stop it but that is one of the main symptoms that no matter what you're doing your brain just goes back to it another symptom you're paralyzed you can't make decisions any creative decision feels like the hardest decision you've ever had to make in your life and as soon as you can bring yourself to make one it's the most worst mistake you've ever made and you immediately want to take it back you have no confidence in any decisions that you make and finally impostor syndrome the worst impostor syndrome ever or you're not just convinced that right now you suck you always suck you will ever suck you sucked when you were born you're just the worst person on earth and absolutely you're gonna feel that way in that moment so when these things are happening you need to recognize you need to recognize the words coming out of your mouth and the thoughts in your head things like I can't get started or I can't focus being in the middle of working on something going wait what was I thinking about because your mind has been back on whatever you're going through emotionally things like I'm just too tired to do this or I'm ashamed to ask this question to say to admit that I can't I can't finish this by myself or it never used to take me this long these are the signs that you're responding to this thing that you're going through and you need to know it's not you really it is not you and here's why it's not you I'm going to talk for a few minutes about what creates a state in which you can be creative based on some studies so first if you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs it's super obvious there's creativity way at the top of the pyramid the stuff that I'm talking about that's disruptive traumatic events in your life all the way to the bottom of the pyramid like I'm down there and physiological at this point but most cancer treatment is there in safety safety of your body and mortality employment is in their family is in their property is in their right so if you have that low layer of the pyramid completely disrupted how do you expect the top of the pyramid to be normal so when you look at studies about what makes people more able to be creative and more effectively creative you see things like this sleep so everybody knows getting good regular sleep makes you more productive but a study at Harvard Medical School showed that students who were asked to solve a creative problem before they went to sleep performed better solve the problem better and faster than students who did not think about it before they went to sleep regular sleep aids your creativity and at age your problem-solving and sleep is the first thing to go when you're going through this situation as everybody knows it's absolutely the first thing that goes day dreaming so studies have shown that regular daydreaming leaving the task at hand mentally for a moment and thinking about something else actually helps you solve the problems it keeps you creative and the best way I can describe that is I'm sure everybody in this room has been stuck on something for days and solved it driving or showering or planning a vacation right that's because releasing you're the main part of your brain from dwelling on it is letting another part of your brain solve it when you're in situations that are traumatic and difficult you don't daydream anytime your mind wanders off a task its back I have to oh I'm gonna have to sell my mom's house you have to go through all our stuff oh my god I forgot to contact this person I need to contact that's all you can think about collaboration is a big part of creativity being able to bounce your ideas off of other people when you're going through these situations you're often alone the situation requires it you're in court for the divorce you're travelling for the family's death you're home for chemo but also you just don't feel like talking to people so even when you're at work you hold yourself up at your desk or your cube or in your office you eat your lunch at your desk you're just not talking to people are collaborating the way that you used to here's an obvious one sunshine not just for vitamin D though a 2002 study found that high school students were at who are asked to design murals that were later judged by independent critics we're more highly rated if they created outdoors in the sunshine versus students who created indoors with no sunshine and when you're going through something like a divorce or cancer treatment or the death of a loved one how often do you go out in the Sun pretty much not at all safety the concept of feeling safe in your creative environment is important if you've watched on Cleese's creativity talk it's a part of that you feel so profoundly unsafe when you're going through this especially since you are so critical of your own ideas you don't feel safe talking about those ideas to anybody else ya know it sounds obvious but happiness there's actually a study that linked students who were thinking happier thoughts with the ability to also create new ideas more easily the very fact that were unhappy inhibits our creativity and finally habit people underestimate the amount that habit affects our creativity there's a reason that my opening was talking about the assembly line of creativity because it is a habit we don't think about it that way we think about it as our jobs but every day when you go up and you perform the rituals to go to work and you do your job that is a habit that you have formed around creativity and you can forget how to be creative so here is something to to make the point of how you can forget things so when you're going through head and neck cancer treatment which is also why I have to drink some of it you take so much radiation to your esophagus that you can't swallow so you have a stomach tube for nutrition so your doctor tells you but you absolutely positively have to swallow at least a sip of water a couple times a day because if you don't your body will forget how to swallow and I'm not kidding if you don't do that you have to go into special physical physical therapy for them to teach you how to swallow and some patients fail and can never swallow again their whole lives because they spent 4 months not swallowing so if your body can forget how to swallow your brain can certainly forget how to be creative when you break those habits having creative habits having habits that support creativity make you more productive and they make you more creative so when I say acknowledge what you're going through and how it affects you I mean acknowledge that it's breaking this cycle it is breaking all of the things that you took for granted as a part of your life and didn't even understand we're feeding your creativity so in those moments it's not you you feel broken and it's not your fault you are the way you are because of what's going through you can't shake it off it's going to be with you for a while you have to acknowledge that this is affecting you in deep ways and whatever it is you have to just take it and deal with it which is what I'm gonna be talking about in a minute and a small side note it's never too late to retroactively Li realize that you were going through this because as creative people we carry all of our failures with us all the time we remember our terrible decisions we remember all the mistakes we made all the things we were wrong about that's how we grow as creators right so we don't take the same bad shot again if you take a bad shot once you're like I remember that sucked I'm gonna do a different one this time right that's why we grow if you failed at a time when you were going through something like this forgive yourself don't carry that as a failure because it's not your fault you don't need to have that on your list of failures if there's any failure there it was a failure for you to understand what you were going through and how it affected you so that was step one so once you understand what you're going through and you can kind of figure it out the next step is to find ways to Center your thoughts and I've said this to people in the past here we're going through stuff and it seems impossible I get it I totally get that it seems impossible so it's Townsend I know it's possible though because when you are told you having curable cancer and you're laying in bed at night in the dark what are you thinking about you're thinking about is it growing inside me where is it growing is it going to be in my esophagus is it gonna stop me from breathing is it gonna hurt when is it gonna kill me how soon is it gonna kill me who haven't I told it that it's going to kill me right so if I can learn to stop that anybody can learn to stop their thoughts so I'm going to talk about how I did that but the one thing I do wanna mention is that even if you think you can distract yourself unless you can learn to control and still your thoughts your unconscious mind is still working on it you have not succeeded and trying to be creative with your subconscious mind working on it is like trying to be creative during this oh that's weird my video didn't play it was an auctioneer belting out an auction of a cow and trying to be creative over the yammering voice of an auctioneer and you do 38 at 8:00 9:00 at 9:49 better than 40 one minute Andrew dump it in and two to 103 now 444 but a time here and 5 here Nebadon 46 here and 5 at a handshake so that's what your brain is doing the whole time you're trying to create and yeah you need to tell it to shut the up right you need the tools to be able to do that so here's what I did so going through the first cancer I could not sleep so that's Priority One because if you're tired dear just f'd you've got to be able to sleep so what I did that helped was relaxation recordings the kind of uses by a guy named Andrew Johnson they're on the iOS store and Android store in the web there are dozens of other options and like many things I'm going to mention in this talk they run the whole gamut from super practical like listen to nature sounds all the way to super fruity like here's your horoscope and let's talk about a mystical journey you're gonna take to your past lives right so whatever wherever you are on that scale whatever you think is or not there's something for you so if you see a whole bunch that you're like I want something to have someone to talk to me about God not talk to me about you know nature sounds there's something for you and if you think that's there's something for you too so don't be discouraged by what you see when you first start so every night I would go to sleep every night listening to this and initially it was great because having the voice gave me something to focus on instead of my own thoughts but over time I trained my brain that when I heard this I would get sleepy [Music] I am Andrew Johnson take some time know to make sure that you're sitting comfortably put your feet on the floor put your hands on your lap take a nice gentle deep breath in and out and just allow your eyes to close just allow your eyes to gently close take your mind and a little journey down through your body down through your legs I get sleepy after listening to it now so because I was trained that that means it's time to sleep and that's what you want to do this is about training you hear this all the time it's true meditation helps I'm a gadget nerd I had a biofeedback device called wild divine I think they may be out of business now but if you look about the mind I think they have a Kickstarter for some new gadget that's similar but there are other biofeedback devices for meditation that are out there it helped me not just because I'm a nerd but because I was able to have something tell me when I was in the correct physical state which meant I could return to that physical state I actually learned to lower my blood pressure by thinking about lowering my blood pressure and clearing my thoughts so it can be a very powerful tool I signed up for headspace it's an online program for meditation has a great trial you can try to see if you like it it's about building the habit of meditation through small sessions at first and longer sessions I found that guided meditation was way better because when you're trying to deal with something difficult if you give more than about two minutes of silence you just your brain goes back to it again you need someone to train you to control that ask the really Buddha fie because it has little-bitty meditations for different times of the day that are about what you're doing at the time like walking to work or taking a break from work or taking a break in the evening before you sleep as soon as they came out with the breathe app for the watch I got it and programmed it for every hour so every hour my watch would buzz and remind me to close my eyes and breathe for a minute and unless I was in a meeting I absolutely did that so there's lots of these options you need to find the ones that work for you but it's important to do it to find something that gets you to sleep and to find things that help you train you to clear your thoughts so something else will help that help me because I'm a giant nerd is a Productivity method I'd studied called getting things done so a part of the theory of getting things done is that you have all this time in your brain this giant list of things that you don't want to forget that you need to do and some of them you do at work and some are things you have to do at home and some other things you have to do the weekend and summary things you have to do next time your mom's house and your brain is always worrying about all of that because it doesn't want to forget it so you make lists based on when something is relevant so you have the list of things I'm gonna do a mom's house and list of things I'm gonna do at home when I get home tonight and the list of things I'm gonna do over the weekend and the important part of this is you're training your brain because over time your brain actually learns hey if I put that list or that thing on the list of stuff I want to do a mom's house and then I do it when I get to Mom's house my brain learns to stop worrying about it as soon as it gets on the list so I made lists and as dumb as it sounds I was doing a whole bunch of research at the time and research and cancer is thinking about cancer all the time so I would book my research times and not let myself research except for that time and over time I stopped thinking about it or I thought about it less because I knew there was a time later that I would be thinking about it and I actually developed my own visualization technique based on this so that you are floating on screen on your back moving along with the current take whatever it is that you can't stop thinking about that you're worried about but you can't do anything about and mentally bundle it into a bundle and visualize yourself taking that bundle and setting it down in the screen beside you you can see it moving with you on the screen because it's in the current just like you're in the current and that means it's gonna travel with you if you get stuck in the reeds it's gonna be stuck in the reeds you don't have to carry it because it's gonna be there you can let it go and visualize it floating away from you let it go and I found that helped me a lot so whatever works for you whatever it is you need to find those tools that let you steal your thoughts so you can be in control of them again so here's the next step then you need to start going to saw beyond yourself so I am a hermit like I'm not even kidding I don't go to speaker parties if I there's a party I'm obligated go to I'm the one in the corner with for the least amount of time immediately leaving as soon as I possibly can so it sounded fine that I would be working from home during chemo because I would be immunocompromised but it's so isolating and we forget how much connection with other people is what fuels our creativity those of us who have worked out of offices and then worked from home know that the effect that it has on your creativity so you need to find ways to incorporate other people you can start with the people around you friends and family and more important you can enlist them in helping you with the first three things on the list like my boyfriend would see me would glance at my computer screen and see it was cancer research studies and tell me stop because he knew that I wanted to think about cancer less I have another friend who when I would be talking on slack with her about I just can't solve this problem I'm super stuck I feel so stupid she would say how much have you eaten today because when I was going through chemo it would get to be four or five at night and I would have had nothing literally nothing to eat and she knew that affected me and she would tell me to eat so enlist your friends with the science have let them help you because they want to therapy is a huge help and if you're a therapy skeptic for whatever reason you need to think about it differently when you're going through a traumatic period you see a podiatrist when there's a thing on your foot there's a thing on your heart and you need to see a specialist about it and you don't need to be shy about it or feel weird about it so I didn't get therapy for my first two cancer's sessions but incurable yeah I went to a specialist who deals with people who have cancer and when people talk about therapy they usually talk about how good it is to unburden but honestly it's a two-way street at least for me and maybe that's just a part of who I am for me it was super helpful having someone who doesn't know me tell me it's not my fault it was helpful to hear someone who's dealt with a bunch of people in this exact situation tell me everybody goes through this of course you're going through this this is normal because hearing that from a husband or friend of course they say that they you feel like they have to say that right hearing it from somebody who's a professional is different you can find online resources I mean obviously vet them and make sure you're comfortable with them but there are lots of online resources for whatever you're going through so for me it was cancer survivors Network forum for my first cancer because they had a really good head neck cancer forum but their lung cancer forum isn't great so I found a different one which was called inspire and went there through lung cancer and then immunotherapy which I'm in right now Twitter Facebook whatever it is find a community of people that you can trust and talk to who are going through the same thing and then you'll find the other way that I found really helped me which is helping other people so the act of talking about what you're going through with people going through something similar doesn't just help you it helps them and then it circles back around and helps you again because saying to somebody else oh I know exactly how that feels and it's not your fault I went through that same thing and I couldn't work for a week when I was going through the stage of chemo you're telling yourself that too you're telling yourself that it's okay and actually helping people even going through something different telling that person at the office who didn't finish something because he was up all night with his kid because they're going through a divorce telling him it's okay god that sucks I'm so sorry don't worry about it of course you couldn't finish it is reinforcing to you that what you're going through is important and maybe it's okay that you couldn't finish something to write helping other people helps you now the big question is how much do you want to tell other people that you know or publicly about whatever you're going through and that's an individual decision so I'm speaking here only from my own perspective everybody has to make this decision for yourself I talked about every cancer publicly I had a blog I talked about on Twitter I really thought before I talked about incurable cancer on Twitter because I was like who is ever going to hire me again if I say I haven't curable cancer which if you think about it sounds like a problem that's gonna solve itself doesn't it but turns out I did have to interview after talking to people about incurable cancer it's not the end of the world and in fact the more you talk about what you're going through the more you shine a light on it the more it stops being a dark secret the more it stops being a thing that you're trying to hide the more it stops being a negative and the more it starts to become just a part of who you are so step number five for you need to find low pressure creative outlets so if remember this you've forgotten you broken your patterns but you don't want to launch back into something super complicated again because you're just gonna be doubting yourself it's not gonna be a pleasant experience if you're trying to continue to work while you're going through whatever it is you know how hard it is every day you don't need to bring that home to but when am saying is if you can find small creative activities that are low pressure and not associated with your day job you can start to get that part of your brain firing away again in a non-judgmental way so here a couple of things that I did rockin so rockin is awesome but rockin it's all so magic because Rockman makes you feel like you're creative and you're really not being creative at all right but you feel like you are that's the magic and the design of Rockman karaoke has a little bit that there's something just really special about rock band so you and yourself with rock band and a guitar controller or a microphone in a room even though and you are being judged because you're being scored but we're all game developers so we look at that we're like oh okay I know I just need to push these buttons better and you still feel creative so it's a great sounds strange but it's a great first step toward feeling you can be free and like you can express yourself again colouring books code books are actually great I had a friend mail me I hope one to love them and it was fantastic and I remember there was a period of time where I was paralysed over picking a color literally paralyzed chief creative officer of a major third-party developer and I was paralyzed picking a color for a coloring book these getting in this creative situation again it's hard you need to find little ways right and I think the color and it was okay and that was a part of the journey back to being creative again I also really like sent angles so the tangles you can buy a kit on Amazon or look up how to do them but basically have a card of a fixed size you divide the card into segments and then fill the segments with patterns and you don't invent the pattern there that you copy them and you can even roll the dice for what pattern goes where so it can be zero creative decisions when you start it but you do in an ink no do-overs you're committing and over time as you do it both the ritual of drawing the pattern is therapeutic but over time you'll find yourself starting to make creative choices like huh I think that pattern should be a little bit bigger or or I like that one better so it's another good thing on the road but whatever you find you need to find little things not connected with your work where you can have a judgment-free environment to start being creative again so then once you've done all of those things you're ready for step five which you are going to plan your escape and down the elevator we can't move and pass the guards with the guns and into the vault we can't open without being seen by the cameras oh yeah sorry I forgot to mention that yeah well say we do all that we're just supposed to walk out of there with a hundred and fifty million dollars in cash on us without getting stopped yeah oh okay so you're gonna go on the creativity heist and it's a specific plan so remember these things the things that contribute to creativity you're gonna use those to take your brain back so here's how you're gonna do it step one you're gonna make sure you can sleep every night nothing else matters and teach can sleep every night for a week and whatever you find he'll let you sleep every night you keep doing it like until you feel like you don't need to do it anymore and if you ever relapse and can't sleep you start doing it again and nothing moves until you can sleep as soon as you can do that you find ways to take breaks to daydream if you have to force it you make yourself plan into your next vacation you make yourself look at childhood videos or photos you make yourself play a game that's nothing like the game that you're making you find ways to disconnect during the day next you reach out to other people you find a way to connect to other people and talk to them about what you're going through all of these are mandatory you can figure out how to do it it can be anonymous but you need to find a way to talk to people about what you're going through you're gonna get some sunshine you're going to come out of wherever you are you're gonna sit by a window you're going to sit at a park bench you're gonna find a way to get some sunshine at least once a day you're gonna make sure you have a safe space to create sometimes that means like your coworkers sometimes it means only some of your coworkers sometimes it means finding one person that you trust and bouncing your ideas off of that person first hey can you read the stock you need somewhere that feels safe for you to take those first creative steps you're not doing it in front of your whole normal audience and then you're gonna gather things around you that make you happy even if it feels artificial at first when I was walking to work every day after chemo the second chemo I had a Spotify playlist called walking inventive and it was happy music by God and I listened to it every day and it didn't matter how I felt that was the playlist I listen to when I walked to work because it framed me for the day and so you're gonna do these you're not just gonna do them you're gonna schedule these things you are building habits through doing this that's the whole point is to build new habits to rebuild those habits that you lost so one good way to do that is journaling there are a lot of different journals again this is one called the dragon tree journal that has like life for tools and stuff like that in it again these run the whole gamut from the Journal of have you slept what did you eat did you exercise today which by the way exercise is a great way to get that sunlight going all the way from that though again to the the side of let's talk about Zen let's talk about gratitude let's talk about past lives right so wherever you are on that spectrum there's a journal that's going to work for you so you just have to look for the one that's right but the point is there are planners that are not around work but are around goals and personal life so find one of these fill it out write about your experiences there's actually evidence showing that journaling everyday becomes a key part of creativity it unlocks part of your brain it encourages you to solve problems so what you are doing here is you are rebuilding habits you are starting the assembly line up again and it's going to be crazy and wacky and feel disconnected but over time it's the way that you get back to yourself again it's the way that you give back to predictable creativity which is what makes you feel like yourself again if you're anyone like me so now you've gone through all of these steps and once you doing that reliably and you feel like you have started to get back onto the assembly line again it's time for the last one which honestly is just to endure when I was going through both cancer treatments especially the second one I had a lot of friends and people tell me you're such a warrior you're so brave and I was like those are the Warriors the doctors that saved my life those are the Warriors me yeah I kind of just took it right I just waited it out that's really what I did I just sat it out and waited for it to pass right waited for things to change I mean certainly now I know to take a more active role in recovering my creativity but when it comes to whatever you're going through all you can do is endure it is weighted out so there's this interesting study on creativity from the Georgia Institute of Technology that showed that whether you brood over negative things or actively reflect on them helps determine quote whether you slump into depression or jump into creativity now I am NOT saying that you need to look at your trauma positively if somebody told me I do know positively a incurable cancer I probably punch them in the face so I am NOT saying that animal if it sucks it sucks and you need to be honest about it sucking but I do believe there's a little bit of a choice there I do believe that we can choose to reflect on what's happened like I can stand up here and talk to you about the fact that yeah this cancer probably gonna kill me and that's okay right because I reflect on what that means I've thought about it I'm not carrying it around like something I'm brooding on I'm reflecting on it there is a choice and what I'm saying though is that you can also think about the things that you're gaining and going through the like wisdom in perspective and resilience because you are gaining things and that's what you reflect on because you're not just enduring when you look at it all of these steps have that recognition that sense of awareness that sense of pondering built into them you're not just enduring you're enduring and you're growing so when you start radiation treatment you get a tattoo you can actually with this shirt you can kind of see it it's so they can place the equipment reliably every day when you're laying on the table so every day for three years I look in the mirror after showering and there's my my little my little beauty mark I never had before and I don't think that it's a coincidence that I would wake up every morning look at that died and it was the first time after 20 years in the industry that I talked about being a woman in game development and I don't think it's a coincidence that I would look at that dot every morning and write for gamasutra about diversity I don't think it's a coincidence that at this point I look at two dots because I needed a second one for for lung cancer I don't think it's a coincidence I look at those every morning and I'm here talking to you the things that we go through change us and they can change us in good ways and bad ways I have lots of side effects and that's okay but they change us so I said I'd circle back around to mr. death here and exactly where his scythe is positioned at the moment so I went into a clinical trial I'm the second one on the left it combines two immunotherapy agents it's was phase one when I went in it about a year and a half ago I don't know if it's even phase two yet it might be going into Phase two so in June of last year they released the first results at a one of the big cancer conferences so in previously treated patients with SC CH n which is head and neck cancer the combined Orr was 23% that's objective response rate believe it or not 23% is high for immunotherapy that means 23% of the patients responded to it they had one CR and six PRS a PR means a partial response it means your tumor shrank or stayed the same which is a victory in metastatic incurable cancer because it means they're not growing and killing you they had one complete response meaning the cancer is gone that was me I was that one response science for the win so I still haven't curable cancer this cancer probably is gonna kill me I feel pretty good it's not gonna be this year based on other things in the study feel pretty good about next year too but I also feel like the luckiest person on the face of the earth I should not be standing here right now right so I get scans every two months he could mutate anytime still luckiest person ever and when I first responded to the trial it took a while to sink in I am on the road again hey I need to care about stuff I didn't think I needed to care about right I had a will I was ready and now I'm like oh I guess I should finish my car payments right so but what I've learned though and going through this is that we're all on the open road all of us every minute we're alive we're on the open road and the thing I want to tell you is I'm nothing special I'm a game developer just like you are and I went through some everybody goes through some it's really not special I endured and I grew and I changed and so will you and I've learned that no matter what was going on I wasn't broken I'm not broken none of you are broken no matter what's happening to you you're not broken you're growing all of us are growing so I have a few minutes for questions sorry but I know what it's like to not want to talk about stuff in front of people hi so my dams are open on Twitter if anyone wants to ask any questions privately or talk so thank you so any questions if anyone's feeling brave and it's ok if there aren't any because I yeah yes there's a microphone actually sorry should I mention it there's a microphone in the center which makes it worse sorry now you don't just have to ask this question we have to actually get up and move and then talk loud so sorry I just didn't want to make people wait for me to walk around so I live with an invisible illness and one thing that I struggle with is going a really long time between jobs yes and it's very hard sometimes to interview with someone and say hey I was out of the industry for two years because I was under growing really severe treatment but I'm fine now and I can work really well yeh how do you deal with those gaps or how do you talk about those gaps when you interview yeah so super fun making the decision are we gonna look for a new job when you've talked about having a curable cancer in public that was awesome ray of hope not talking about a public yet but I got a new job so it's not impossible you actually can do it it's a thing that I it's the thing that makes it tricky honestly in that situation is the law as well so secretly I'm a lawyer I did that before I was a game designer so I unfortunately have to put that hat on occasionally whether I went to or not so this is my lawyer hat even though I'm not giving your legal advice that's the problem right is you don't want to talk about a disability in an interview when I was interviewing for the role that I'm taking I actually didn't say any I mean it's not hard to figure out you read my Twitter I mean obviously when I start looking for a job I stopped talking about it briefly but just look at my Twitter I mean it's not super hard to figure that out about me but I didn't talk about it till they gave me the offer and I said by the way I need to know that it's okay that I'm gonna have to fly to Los Angeles because in Seattle I'm gonna have to fly to Los Angeles one day every two weeks for the trial treatment non-negotiable so I think it is tough I think I'm gonna tell you what my boyfriend told me and I'm gonna try to say it without crying if they are the kind of company that you can't be honest with you don't want to work for them anyway if you can't be who you are and they want to support you in that and they think these things make you better and these things make you awesome then you don't want to work for them anyway so that would be my advice to you thank you so much you mentioned how you're very open when it comes to talking about your cancer and how it's up to everyone to make that decision for themselves whether or not or how open they want to be when it comes to talking about what they're going through what would you recommend for someone who wants to be a lot more open about what they're going through but finds it really really scary and difficult to do that oh yeah I mean that's a holy crap hi I don't I mean I'm the worst case scenario because I'm super private and I really am a hermit I mean I had to get over it to be a creative lead so in my job I'm not a hermit at all but you give me any as soon as I get home from work I am like locked in a closet so I think what I found helpful honestly one of the hardest things about being 90 diagnosed with cancer is telling everybody who loves you super rough right and I actually started to understand the widening circles of who you tell things to win at different times it's interesting when you think about it right like these are the people I have to tell first these the people I have to tell second these the people I can tell on Facebook right and all of those people should hear before I say it on Twitter but honestly for me talking about it on Twitter was the easiest because they I don't have a personal relationship with a lot of the people they're right anybody on Twitter that I have a personal relationship with already knew it was so removed from everything and at least from my Twitter community so supportive that I found that easier I also find it easier to blog because it was me telling people like typing my thoughts and then posting the blog to Twitter or to Facebook right I found that that really helped one of the main things you have to at least for me that was a problem was I didn't want people to look at me like I was in any way diminished or feel sorry for me right that's why my spoiler alert I'm not gonna die it was at the front of this write I don't want people looking at me that way so that's what I would say is find some way to talk about it that you can share with a little bit of distance to kind of get yourself used to it cool thank you so much you're welcome yes hi sometimes you go through a trauma right and it's it's a bad event and there's a long healing process but the nature of random events in life is that sometimes you get a bad run and you clearly have how do you talk to the people around you who who see the you're struggling right because there's tons of good advice here for how to try to find a way out yourself but it's a complicated dynamic system to be in relationship to a lot of people who love you and want you to succeed and know that you can do better than you're doing right now and - yeah really struggle not only with that internal sense of worthlessness or diminishment but also with not wanting to disappoint the people who are trying to help you get out of it right did you find any resources about how to communicate with those folks yeah so what I'd recommend even if you're not dealing with cancer is that you Google what not to say to people who have cancer people say some pretty amazing things to people who have cancer luckily I didn't have a lot of that but it's it's wacky but what I learned in looking at that was that you just need to be honest right sometimes not in the moment if somebody says something to you or is trying to help in a way that's not actually helpful or or is not helping when you feel like they should let that moment go and add a more neutral time you need to be honest I was forced into that when I went into the incurable cancer because I said to my boyfriend about some of his relatives I said I do not want a single post about broccoli curing cancer or right to take this special Chinese herb just get that out right I do enough research that if there's something that is anti cancer I know about it probably but I don't want any of that mystical crap when I'm trying to go through this and I just you just have to be honest if you can't be honest find a loved one who can again get that distance from yourself don't when you're in these situations the last thing you needs to take more burden on yourself you already have enough so find a loved one like me and listening my version to tell you know his relatives at find a loved one who maybe can have that conversation for you but you really just have to be honest because the other thing I'll say is difficult to say is if there's someone that's poisonous and difficult just get to get them out that's it done cut it you don't need it it's not helping you you don't owe them anything other than you know maybe a reason for why you're cutting them out but that's what I would say is you just have to be honest and tell people what you need they can't guess unless even if they've been through it you're being through been through they honestly just can't guess mm-hmm go ahead so my entire family has this concept of just let it go similar to frozen I'm sure everyone has heard that song right now but I have always struggled with the concept of how to let it go like I always feel like there's this just demon on my shoulder that's just constantly whispering doubt and just terrible things about me that I know are not true yep how do you get it to either shut up or to feed the feed to Angel Jose so it's those steps the first the first step is still in your mind you need to be able to control your thoughts at this point I can actually stop thinking about dying right I will find myself going online and researching I research the trial that I'm on pretty often and I will find myself going to look at statistics and then I'll be like no nope I am NOT doing that you just have to build the tools but the thing is it's not willpower it's not a failure in your and you that you can't do it it's training it is exercise for your brain you need to think about it that way I also recommend CBT therapy a lot of what I'm talking about in this actually is CBT therapy I have my undergrad with psychology and again I don't run on qualified to practice it but I can say that repeating the same exercise will train your brain and the first exercise is not to train yourself that those thoughts are bad but to train yourself to control your thoughts at all so meditation things like that that's what's gonna get you to the point that you can start to control those thoughts thank you uh-huh yeah hi so first of all thank you you're welcome so I just wanted to ask you know I'm kind of struggling with you know having been unemployed for a few months and I get into this weird feedback loop where you know I'll have anxiety over this unemployment then I'll feel guilty because like oh another one of my friends has been unemployed for longer and they're putting on a good face and then that makes me feel more guilty which me before feel more anxious like oh my god they're dealing with us so much better than me talking about the section that I deleted from my talk because I didn't have enough time which I had a video of John Oliver talking about what about ISM because you're what about in yourself or what about is in yourself right so I went through all this radiation and had been wondering where is my superpower right because I guess I've gotten so many scans I get CT scans with radioactive contrast every two months right so where is my CD where is my superpower and I realized that my superpower is to make anyone who's complaining me about anything shut up when they remember I have incurable cancer right no one wants to talk to me about any problem ever right because they're comparing you can't compare everyone goes through things like this uniquely your experience is unique from someone else's you cannot compare because everything that's happened in your life has combined to make you unique from someone else you have things in your past that might make what you're going through easier or harder than someone else going through the exact same thing I absolutely know that it's my design background and my objectivity that enables me to stand up here and talk about this stuff so objectively right I'm trained for it other people couldn't do that so you need to not compare yourself you need to other people not to compare you need to acknowledge what they're going through right so let's talk about being am unemployed together let's talk about what we're doing together when you say something I mean you can acknowledge it and say if you're complaining about being unemployed you can say yeah I know it's been even longer for you put it on the table it's a fact don't feel guilty about it just acknowledge it but don't what about yourself it's not helping anybody so I think I'm at a time and I think you're also the last question did you want to follow up we can talk okay cuz I can also I'll go to the the follow up area so okay everybody thank you [Applause]

Channel: GDC

Views: 17,444

Rating: 4.8372879 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: eTWchlLFL-Y

Length: 63min 11sec (3791 seconds)

Published: Thu May 10 2018