The Boring Middle

I’m sorry if I missed your call, or text, or email. I missed that event I said I would attend tonight, and last Thursday, and last Friday too.

Everything in my life is on hold.

I just need to get out of this slump.

It’s been nearly a year since we incorporated Figment Interactive Inc. on December 11, 2024, and recently I’ve been wrestling with a simultaneous dip in our momentum, my creative energy, and my sense of identity.

I’ve also spent the last four months doing the most boring, thankless work ever: refactoring our entire product. It was so boring that, over time, I became boring.

I feel like the textbook case for your actions become your habits become your identity. Four months of not taking care of my body and not doing the things I love has done its damage on my self esteem.

I need to find my spark again.

Momentum, Creativity, Identity

Momentum, creativity, and personal identity are all waves in this entrepreneurial journey that influence and interfere with each other.

Startups are all about momentum. After emerging from a flashy accelerator, the “coming out of stealth” mystery box grand reveal moment, changing your mind a few times, and having your guts ripped out a few more times, how do you return to the arena ready to throw a punch with wisdom, and not weariness?

And for a company whose momentum so deeply entangled with Eliot’s and my creative identities, how do we find stability in our work when the tsunami-sized waves of stress, learning, growth, and change keep reinventing who we think we are?

The Creative Cadence

Let’s understand how the pendulum swings.

My friend Athena came up with a concept I love: creativity is like breathing.
Breathing in is taking in ideas. Letting them marinate, entangle, collide into the shape of something new. Breathing out is creation.

I’ve learned to lean into this inhaling–exhaling cadence. Since creativity is so entangled with my sense of identity, this on-off rhythm has allowed me to step away, take myself apart, reassess who I’ve become, and rebuild myself in a way that feels authentic to each new version of me.

July 2024: Breathe in. I worked in my parent’s garage, talked to interesting people on the internet, read articles, tried out some games, and caught up on AI.

October 2024: Breathe out. We made our first game prototypes with Figment. I put my first video of myself on the internet - a terrifying, awkward uphill climb.

December 2024: Breathe in. I visited New York and caught a glimpse of the 20-something life in NYC through the eyes of an old friend.

January 2025: Breathe out. Developing and shipping experiments that intersect storytelling and play. In June 2025, I started putting videos out again, this time with a renewed confidence. The way I presented myself felt increasingly true to my inner world. As I put things out there, people hopped into my corner of the internet and I felt seen.

“I could just do this forever!” she thought.

She could not.

As the novelty of the new company tapered over time, a series of unfortunate and fortunate events - a cofounder breakup, 10 months of moving constantly, finally finding a home, and revisiting my life story through the revealing lens of undiagnosed ADHD-I - have molded me into a distinctly new shape I don’t recognize yet.

I am definitely not the Shubha I was in June. I could create like she would (people like her, right?) but it would just leave me feeling exhausted. I could no longer be seen through her work. I was someone else.

And so, I’ve taken a step away to reassess who I’ve become.

There’s actually a lot of fun in assuming and shedding identities throughout a lifetime. Deep within, they’re all cinched together by a core Shubiness that has always been, and will always be, consistent.

You can’t see her directly - you can only glimpse her through how she chooses to express herself in response to an ever-changing world

Get Me Out of Here!

Now that I’ve been through this creative ebb and flow process a few times during this company’s existence (and an exhausting number times during my own personal existence), I’ve figured out the rough shape of a path out of the slump that I’m currently in the process of enacting, if you haven’t already noticed:

Step 1: Sit in limbo. Be incredibly uncomfortable. ✅ Having been in a slump before, it’s a sucky place to be but do not be in a slump about being in a slump. That secondary emotion can cause a lot of damage. Trust that this too shall pass.

Step 2: Try on some new skins. ✅ Impulsively cut your own bangs. Incessantly deploy online rebrands of yourself. Let yourself respond to the new skin - do you like it? Do you completely hate it and need to bobby pin it away every day for the next year as it slowly grows past the awkward phase? All useful information.

Step 3: Write from the heart and toss it into the internet ocean. ✅ By nature of the medium, writing is a “safe space.” I assume anyone who has made the deliberate choice to go out of their way and read this long-ass-essay (hello there) has at least some level of baseline receptiveness, stability, and curiosity. By nature of the medium, Reels and Tweets do not require those things. I cloak myself in the steady, welcoming waters of essays before venturing back into the choppy and unpredictable seas of an Instagram or X.

Step 4: Gather any resulting momentum and feed it back into creating - a feedback loop! Anchor on how creating and sharing your work makes you feel seen. How it turns your experience from something you are alone in, into something that connects you with others. Start with low stakes, low judgement creative play and snowball up from there. Just keep putting things out there.

The only steady force that has strengthened momentum, creativity, and identity simultaneously for Figment and for myself has been exactly this: respecting the creative cadence and rediscovering myself in each new era through creative play.

And since we are an SF-native startup, I want to clarify my stance - no amount of guilt, self-flagellation, imposed 9-9-6, or forced discipline can outlast someone whose energy to create is rooted in joy. Creative play is the soul of our company and every output from Figment is an expression of that belief.

Creating is simultaneously a gentle question, “Who am I?” and a joyous discovery, “Oh, this is who I am!”

It’s the path I trust in now to lead me back to myself.