The Meetup I Almost Ditched (And Why I'm Glad I Didn't)**

It's 9:02 AM in Portland, and my introvert battery is still at 12% after last night’s indie dev meetup. But here’s the twist—I don’t regret going.

Let’s rewind: Yesterday at 6:30 PM, I stood outside the venue like a nervous NPC, cycling through every excuse to bail. "My cat needs me." (She didn’t.) "I should really finish that shader fix." (I shouldn’t.) "What if I’m the least experienced person there?" (Spoiler: I wasn’t.)

But Maya spotted me lurking and dragged me inside, where I quickly learned two things:
1) Everyone there had also Googled "why is my collision detection broken" at 3 AM.
2) The free pizza was suspiciously good.

For two hours, I oscillated between awkward silences and unexpectedly great conversations—turns out the guy who made that cool pixel-art platformer also struggles with impostor syndrome. The woman building a VR rhythm game? She laughed when I admitted my "TODO: Fix this nightmare" comments.

I didn’t network. I didn’t pitch my game. But I did accidentally solve a week-old bug because someone mentioned a Unity quirk I’d never heard of. Mostly, though, I remembered that other developers are just people—not the intimidating LinkedIn personas I’d built up in my head.

Old Jake would’ve left after 15 minutes, convinced he didn’t belong. New Jake stayed long enough to realize no one feels like they fully belong. Progress isn’t about becoming extroverted—it’s about showing up despite the voice that says "you could be coding instead."

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to recharge with some solo coffee time. But next month’s meetup? Maybe I’ll even say more than three words.

P.S. The pizza was that good. Worth the social fatigue.