SaraEileen.com

Note: I wrote this yesterday on the train as I left the city, and didn’t manage to get it up until now.

Yesterday Kink For All New York City, the sexuality unconference I’ve been (un)organizing with Meitar, came off spectacularly well. Now I am all full up with the people I met, the ideas I heard, the things I still want to say. That, after all, is the point. We fill people up with ideas and then they go and spill those ideas out into the world in new ways.

Kink For All started in a cafe down the street from our Sydney apartment about 12 weeks ago. Meitar went to a Bar Camp in Sydney, and over breakfast and flat whites he raved at me about his experience.

“Y’know,” I said, “that could work for kink.”

“It could,” he said. “It could. Oh wow. It really could.”

So we did it. And I have to say how gleeful I am over the entire thing, conceived and brought to being as it was, in less than 3 months and with us on the other side of the world.

I did expect KFANYC to go moderately well; it’s a good model that relies on energy, intelligence and enthusiasm, and considering the attendee list, we had those in abundance. But I have to say, I did not expect it to go as well as it did.

I actually think every issue we ran into yesterday came about because we simply didn’t plan for it to get as big as it did. (For example, next time I’m involved with a KFA I’m going to make sure there’s an allotted social space. Too many conversations that needed a place to spill and couldn’t find one. And schwag orders will go in earlier. And I will eat something instead of living on grapes all day.)

Meitar and I expected perhaps 40 attendees. There were over 100.

I had worried that we wouldn’t fill the schedule grid. There were 45 different presentations.

We started with no money and figured we would pay for what we needed ourselves. Over $1000 dollars were donated.

I wasn’t sure we’d have everything we needed. In the end, we were overly resourced; extra projectors, kosher and vegetarian and gluten-free food, gallons of drinking water that appeared seemingly from nowhere.

As I said at the end of the day when I stood on the stage, “our cup overflows.”

I met a ton of new and exciting and awesome people, although running the schedule made it hard for me to sit and stay with everyone as long as I would like. (I think I’ve made enough coffee dates to keep me in coffee for the next month. I want to see my friends, for real, and restfully.) Everywhere I turned, someone was there saying, “How can I help?” How amazing is that? So amazing. Should I try to tamp my enthusiasm down, has it overflowed perhaps a bit too much? I don’t really want to. I want to go dancing and hug people.

Look, I said this at the end of the day yesterday, but it needs saying again: if you helped us, thank you. Although Mei and I gave the concept a shape and pushed the event into being, I did not anticipate the groundswell, the support we received. Also, that I am so f’ing proud of everyone, in a grateful gooey kind of way.

Next steps: we get everything online. I keep talking. (After I sleep for a week.) Other people keep talking. Some sort of easily accessible resource page comes into being. We get more feedback. Ideas are formed. I sit down with other people who want to take lead roles next time around, and we figure out when/if/how that will be. And in a little while, a few months perhaps, when things have settled, it happens again. Perhaps with me, perhaps not. It’s out in the world now. Anyone can take it on, and up.