How community energises and drains me

Running Friends of Figma Karachi is the most energising thing I do. It is also the most draining. Both are true on the same evening.

My day job is Head of User Experience and Design at 10Pearls. The chapter sits outside that job. I run it because I want to, not because I have to.

I host the events. I introduce designers to new tools and new ideas. I make a room where people can learn from each other.

I leave those nights full. Then I go quiet for two days. For a long time that pattern confused me.

The loud room

A meetup is a loud room. People, open laptops, questions, ideas moving fast.

I feed on all of it. A designer shows me work I have not seen. Someone asks a question I cannot answer yet. Someone disagrees with me and turns out to be right.

The event has a shape. A talk, then questions, then the part where nobody leaves. People stay by the door and keep talking. That last hour is where the real work happens.

Hosting is a giving act. You hold the room so other people can relax into it. You watch who has gone quiet and pull them back in.

I am not the loudest person in most rooms. At my own event I become the host anyway. I stay switched on until the last person heads home.

I walk out lighter than I walked in. For a few hours I am the most alive version of myself.

The quiet room

Then the room empties. The next morning I am flat.

I do not want to talk. I do not want to open a file. I want two days with the door shut.

Those are not lazy days. My head is still running the meetup on a loop. It replays the good moments and the awkward ones, over and over.

I check my phone the next day and feel nothing. A message that would normally interest me just sits there. The tank is empty, and it does not refill on command.

Slowly the noise settles. By the third day I am useful again.

The old story

For a long time I read those two days as a problem.

A leader should bounce back faster. A social person should want the next room, not the silence after it. That was the story I told myself.

So I treated the quiet as a fault to fix. I read it as low stamina. I never did fix it, because nothing was broken.

The price

The quiet days are not a fault. They are the price.

The energy of that room is real. The cost of holding it is real too. I pay in two slow days, and the rate is fair.

I am not drained because the night went wrong. I am drained because it went right. I gave it my attention, not a performance. Attention sends a bill.

Presence is what I am spending. Standing in a room and meaning it takes more than it looks like. You cannot fake it for three hours and walk away clean.

Anything worth doing carries a cost like this. I had been trying to keep the reward and skip the invoice.

What changed

Nothing about my wiring changed. My reading of it did.

I stopped calling the quiet days a flaw. I started calling them the second half of the same event.

The meetup is the spend. The two days are how I earn it back. One half pays for the other.

The same attention

The attention I spend on that room is the same attention my work needs. There is one supply of it. I cannot pour it out on a Thursday night and have it full on Friday.

So the quiet days are not me hiding. They are me refilling the one thing the job runs on.

Fewer, and meant

So I say yes to fewer things now. And I mean the ones I keep.

A yes is not free. Every yes I give spends a piece of that same supply. A calendar full of small yeses leaves nothing for the few that count.

One good room, held well, beats three rooms I show up to half-present. The people there can feel the difference. So can I.

I plan the next Figma night. Then I protect the days on both sides of it. The quiet is not leftover time. It is booked, the same as the event.

There are two small boys at home who need my focus too. Fewer yeses is how I keep enough of it for the things that matter.

I used to want only the loud half. The full room, the fast talk, the walk to the car still buzzing.

Now I take both halves. The loud room, then the closed door. I need the second one to keep showing up for the first.

That is the deal. I signed it on purpose.