Summit at Sea: An Escape From The Default World (for some)
During which I discovered even an opulent cruise with exceptional people is not enough to tame my inner sad girl.
Miami
It’s been about a week since I returned from Summit at Sea, the Summit community’s flagship event. A cruise that stretched from a Wednesday to Sunday and stopped at Bimini Island, it’s something that I have been urged to go to for years and has been described as TED meets Burning Man.
I was already in Miami, and spent Monday and Tuesday at The National hotel and socializing with some Hereticon alumni. I was really excited, it was my first cruise and so many people who have been part of my fairytale ascendance were going to be present. I had opted for ‘early boarding’, which meant I would spend Wednesday on the ship while most others would arrive Thursday.
I booked an Uber with friends I had dined with Tuesday night, and the trip to the Port of Miami was so enjoyable. I spent part of it contemplating how many life changing moments I was going to have, and the rest in conversation over events past and present.
The line wasn’t too brutal, but I was held up for a while due to some need to register for a Bahamas immigration thing that I had missed in one of the emails. I made conversation with some folks in the same boat before I was eventually allowed to board.
I lugged my laptop bag all the way to my cabin, and truly relaxed for the first time. I had a triple suite, with a terrace and hammock, and had the choice of 3 beds since I was the first one to our cabin. I chose the bed by the window, tore open the Summit gift bag, and rested for 15 - 20 minutes.
I started exploring my surroundings and compared The Scarlet Lady, our cruise ship, to the other events I had been to recently. It was closest to Hereticon and Faena Miami Beach. The ship was opulent, with bright colours that were almost within the traditional Miami colour palette but with just a tiny shift into more nautical hues.
The ship had a cozy feel owing to the reduced population, and I enjoyed exploring. There was a coffee shop, the cafeteria-esque Galley, an ice cream shop, and more. The most theatre-like venue was called The Red Room, but I sadly did not run into Laura Palmer or Dale Cooper the few times I visited. There were multiple restaurants, with themes ranging from the classic Italian Extra Virgin to the more traditional American The Wake.
The first night was really great, I met my roommates (who I later found out had been hand-picked by Summit for me) and generally was loving what I thought was a true escape from the default world. I was looking forward to experiencing all the good things that my friends had predicted.
Thursday
On Thursday I slept in a bit, and headed up to the top deck to walk around a bit. I had an experience in a chair that dispensed vibrations that was really amazing, it alternated strong vibrations with a comedown that really put you into a relaxed state. I was introduced to a few people by one of my mentors and was really looking forward to another great day.
I met up with my friend Ashley, who I had met at a SXSW party last year. That party was one of my all-time favourites, I was talking to friends and Ashley came up to me and said ‘Excuse me, are you Ivy?’ She had heard me on Clubhouse back in its prime and we struck up an instant friendship.
We went one deck down and sat on the sun-couches to catch a talk and this is when things started to turn on me. Ashley couldn’t stay for the whole thing, and after she left the first instance of some of the Summit crowd making it exceptionally clear that I was unwelcome.
Thursday (Derogatory)
One of my biggest sources of anxiety was walking into an event as a not-fully transitioned, not-thin, and not-young person where most of the attendees I might be compared to were all of those things. It didn’t happen all at once, but it began during that talk with some of the thin and young crowd putting on their best high school mean girls act as far as getting in my space, blocking my view, etc.
Bad vibes had been building since I had my first meal on the boat, though, as Virgin staff apparently have had zero training on pronouns so being misgendered 10 times a day was the norm. I have a problem with correcting people to begin with, and nerves specific to this event made it so I just didn’t bother.
Soon after, I caught some looks of straight-up disgust from some of them. Ironically, the same kinds of looks as I caught at the SXSW Arkive party, an experience which led to communication with Summit itself which led to me coming to Summit at Sea. To say it took the wind out of my sails is a very large understatement.
It was after the 3rd or 4th Ugh, what is one of those doing here? looks that I just had this moment of existential bemused exasperation and laughed to myself. I had rearranged so much of my personal and professional life around this cruise, invested a not-insignificant amount of time and money, and really let myself buy into what everyone had been telling me.
It seemed to have been for the pleasure of getting one of those high school experiences I missed out on in not having come out when I was in school: Being ostracized by the pretty rich girl table. I spent a lot of time in my room after that, so much so that my roommates often asked if I was okay.
I didn’t go into specifics, but I also wasn’t going to try and invent too much of a story about why I was sitting in a cramped cruise ship cabin rather than trying to make new friends with some of the smartest and most interesting people in the world. Then I thought back to the beginning of the week.
I was in theory doing the same thing prior to the cruise, socializing with some of the smartest and most interesting people in the world who also happened to now be friends, but were attendees at another TED/Burning Man-like event.
The difference between what I felt was night and day. At dinner with them, I felt cared for, celebrated, and a lot of other things I didn’t consistently feel on the boat. Sometimes I wished I had perhaps stayed in Miami and visited with more of of those friends.
I pressed on during the rest of the cruise, though, as there were parties to be had and DJ sets to be danced to at night. I thought: Maybe the mean girls are just the ones that are around the pool during the day, certainly as a practicing club kid I’ll be welcome at the dance parties.
I mostly went to the rave-y venue on the ship, The Manor. Thursday was fun, and also notable in that someone came up to me and basically said that they appreciated I was being fully authentic and expressive and to tell them if anyone gave me a problem. One of those people that said how they found my style refreshing and new.
I felt really good in that moment, but in retrospect I wonder if I shouldn’t have taken this as kind of a sign that there was a reason someone would feel the need to say that to me. I kind of wish I had adjusted expectations at that point because I think I would have spent less time in my room.
Vibe Interlude
There was something that permeated the boat that I think I was never quite able to catch onto; a spirit of play. I got the sense that most of the members of this spontaneous community had never known an existence where they didn’t feel the safety and freedom to play.
I thought back to Vibegala this year, out of everything it’s probably one of the environments I felt the most safe. Until I lost my phone, of course. Something similar happened on the first night on the boat in that my carry-on with my HRT (and other) meds being lost for most of the evening, I had a minor freakout, much as I did at Vibegala.
I spent a solid hour or two on Wednesday night wondering if I’d have to leave before Summit had even started. Withdrawal from my mood stabilizer can include a necrotizing skin rash, so toughing out a weekend without it wasn’t an option. I started looking up flights back to Vancouver for the following day, and spent the next hour talking to both Virgin and Summit staff.
They eventually found my carry-on, but I think that experience planted some malignant seeds. I had tried not to think at all about my safety as a trans person in Florida, but the acute stress brought it to the front of my mind. Did I really feel safe here? Spiritually, yes, but objectively…… I wasn’t sure.
Friday (Derogatory)
Friday morning involved a few more full-on looks of disgust, happening in The Galley. I thought about how appropriate it was for The Galley to be a cafeteria: I often felt a lot of high school energy in that place. Sometimes good ‘first day of class’, sometimes bad ‘you can’t sit with us’.
I think it was obvious to others at a few points during the weekend that I had fallen through the cracks, which is where a few of those random conversations came from. It was a vibrational mirror image of those looks of disgust, and probably stopped me from hibernating in my room even more than I did.
It’s hard to describe what feeling ‘safe’ is in words, but I think you know when you feel the opposite. I actually kind of regret making use of the pool on Friday, which is how my Friday had continued after breakfast.
I wouldn’t have gone had my roommates not come back to our room when I was there on their way. It wasn’t the only place I received looks of disgust, but between it was certainly the lion’s share. It was a lot of psychic damage to take and I think if there was one specific point where things ‘turned’, it was definitely then.
I think that going to the singles events was a mistake, and perhaps was a microcosm of bringing the wrong kind of vulnerability, or at least bringing it to the wrong spaces. I missed the LGBTQ+ meetup, probably due to schedule changes that happened due to rain during the cruise. Not knowing what kind of energy to bring to each different event, I think my mistake was erring on the side of more rather than less.
Friday Night (Less Derogatory)
I went up to Deck 16 to do some flow since the floor was crowded and out of all flow toys, pixel whips can cause the most collateral damage. I thought: certainly, the Burning Man-adjacent cruise will welcome a flow artist!
A grave miscalculation, as it turned out. I did my thing for a bit, and then the mean girls and guys of Summit inflicted their presence on me again. The looks of disgust hurt me the most, but this one guy gave me this look of ‘why are you here?’ which kind of left me in a puzzled state.
If I had the money and freedom that many people on the boat had, I would…… not use my time to give other people dirty looks? I don’t know, perhaps once you attain some arbitrary level of wealth or status that’s just what one does to pass the time.
Anxieties about still feeling mired in the class moat came back very strongly and for the rest of the time until I left Sunday (I was really, really happy when I set foot on terra firma again) I just was not the person that I wanted to show up to this event as. I was no longer that confident, brave woman who had blazed a trail across so many spaces of exceptional people.
I did put on my best Courtney Love persona even after I started feeling unwelcome, and I think it worked to a point. One of my roommates said the vibe I gave off was ‘It Girl who doesn’t give a fuck if anyone thinks she belongs there’. I was both kind of amazed, but kind of sad, because that’s actually not how I wanted to come across.
Before I left Vancouver, I tried to center myself, put aside my natural tendencies to just want to be seen, and really enter Summit at Sea with openness and curiosity. I think I was doing okay until the anxiety really set in, and then I reverted to my natural state. I was hit on (in a very welcome way) a few times but just couldn’t put my instinctual internal shields down enough to really receive it and that still makes me sad.
Saturday (Derogatory-ish)
Saturday was the day the ship ended up at Bimini Island, and most of it disembarked to enjoy the venue. I went with the initial wave, ran into some friends and attended the second incarnation of a Human Connection activity which I was told roughly approximated the rationalist circling activity with some hugging added on top.
Or at least, that was my plan. If going to the pool was an exercise in being judged on appearances, the beach day was the same thing dialled up about 3000%.
I kind of wanted to scream ‘I get it, I’m not thin or attractive, I’m not supposed to be here, I’m sorry!!!’
I chatted with one of my roommates about a trans relative (I deeply wish I had stayed in that conversation) and went to do the activity, and almost made it to the activity starting. I don’t doubt some of my anxiety was in my head, but some of the looks I received certainly were real, and I just fled back to the boat.
I made it back without crying somehow, but the emotions had been gathering ever since the first look of disgust and they needed to come out. As I’ve said before, after starting hormone therapy crying is so cathartic and really does clean me out spiritually so I can re-emerge from moments of scarcity. So I cried for a bit, then went back to the island determined to squeeze some enjoyment out of the sand.
I can’t swim, so I struck up a convo on some of the beach chairs before going to stand in the waves and sand for a bit. A small little way of salvaging the day, but a huge victory and step forward to existing in public for me. A few people including one of my roommates came over and asked if I was okay, and this time I meant it when I said yes.
Some people I had conversations with earlier in the evening came over to say hello, but mostly the Instagram set laid down some subtle intimidation of space crowding and other associated unwelcome actions. I think I even caught the side-eye from one of the performers.
I started to think about how much I had sacrificed to be on the boat, only for the worst elements of the default world to find me on this remote island. Had I ticked some box on my application form that identified social humiliation as a kink?
I thought about the chain of events that led up to this particular point, reaching back almost 3 years to when I first joined Clubhouse. I thought about how Summit hadn’t turned out to be what I wanted it to be, but perhaps was what I needed to feel at this pivotal point of emerging from some fairytale back into a still-magical real world.
Ever since the bad vibes had started creeping in, I had started to go to status normalization. Rattling off who I had dinner with in Miami, my professional accomplishments. At some point I realized how futile that was. It wouldn’t matter to the mean girls of Summit if I had just received the Nobel prize, nor should I have let any of the negative experiences I had colonize my brain in the way that they did.
The Big Night (or not so much)
Surrounded by people geometrically more attractive than me, and having had a few chilly experiences in and around the elevators, I stopped thinking of them as a place for excitement and new connection. Instead they became some very tangible info-hazard. Was one of the growing contingent of Summit mean girls going to be there? Was another founder bro going to throw a ‘ugh, who let one of those in here’ look in my direction?
There was one last dance party to go to, I apologized to my feet and went. On this last night, more than any other, I got more of that ‘not of our element’ vibe. I think it’s important to be fair to Summit and say that this is just A Thing that happens when dance floor social status hierarchy sets in.
I again did the status normalization. Did these people not know I was one of Vancouver’s most prestigious club kids? That I’d been to countless exclusive raves? They did not, of course.
I’ve seen the dance floor status thing happen to others who are deemed to not have the vibe, and admittedly it still happens to me when my fashion sense and charm aren’t able to overcome some physical realities. People crowd you out or otherwise get in your space. Bros will specifically pick the space in front of you to hug each other, have an extended conversation or otherwise kinetically other you.
Summit Bros were definitely cribbing from that playbook, and by this point in the trip I was already feeling socially drained. My social anxiety is extremely well managed but is still there, and I was just kind of done. I asked myself whether being ostracized in this way by this particular circle of elites was an accomplishment, I decided that it was.
I chatted with a friend outside of the dance club for a bit, and then just went back to my room. Earlier at the beach, my friend from the first dance night told me to make sure I had packed, that people would go until the sun came up, etc. I thought about texting them and asking if there was place where people go after the last dance party or if I could join them, but I felt like I was really close to crying again and I didn’t want to give my betters the satisfaction.
I instead told them I was sad we hadn’t seen each other and that I would message them the next time I was in their city. I wish my Summit hadn’t ended on this kind of sad bitch note, but my last act was sitting in our terrace hammock and staring at the black waves until the sun actually did come up.
Aftermath
I’ve also been thinking about whether maybe Summit just isn’t for me. The format certainly is, but the experience just didn’t match up to what my friends in the community had been advertising it as. I thought about Vibegala: Some of my Vibe friends can’t stand it, and it’s one of my favourite parties to attend. Was this just another version of that?
Crystallizing all of these thoughts and feelings as I penned my post-event email to Summit, the answer eventually was that I don’t know if it’s for me or not. I feel like I was cheated out of discovering that this time by the actions of others. Cheated, too, in that I wasn’t afforded the same escape from the default world that the rest of the attendees were.
I talked to friends who attended Zuzalu, the popup crypto-city sponsored by Vitalik that was ending right as Summit was starting. They mentioned that people there were talking about Summit. When I did my initial sad-posting about the trip, they reached out and added that when people had talked about Summit, their words were sometimes less than complementary as to how welcoming it might be.
They didn’t get into further detail, but reading between the lines I would guess that I just couldn’t tick nearly enough of the boxes in the ‘thin, conventionally attractive, Founder/TED Speaker, Burning Man chic’ over-culture that I had observed.
The question that you might have, are the same that I have: How this trip will end up being filed in that part of my brain labelled Ivy’s Socialite Experiences. Did I have a good time? Overall, I would say that maybe I didn’t. Were there times that were good? Without a doubt.
Would I go again? The short answer is yes, the long answer is I would not go again as the person that went to Summit at Sea 2023. I’ve wrestled with the fact that at times Summit was worse than that one SXSW party I went to.
The person that attended Summit was someone who was expecting some utopian epicenter of inclusion, and I think it was ultimately inevitable she was going to be disappointed. It’s still so baffling me to me that if anything I’ve been to since coming out was that kind of utopia, it was Hereticon.
Play and Transition
To some degree, the act of transitioning is open defiance of the default world, and the ultimate act of experimentation and play. I’ve been lucky enough to have been afforded that space in my trans journey for the most part, and having it taken away for my time at Summit did have a powerful impact on me.
I strongly hold that Ivy is not the person that I was previously known as with different hormones, but a new being. Birthed out of 6 grams of psilocybin and the pandemic, She’s had the freedom to let her metaphorical vines snake around every object, and expand into every crevice. Anything less would be such a waste.
I carry that metaphorical expansiveness into the real world as much as I can. It’s my default state of being now, and it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. When showing up to a normie business conference, I expect people to stare sometimes. I did not expect it from a community with so heavy a Burner population.
In talking to some of my fellow Summiteers after the event, though, I kind of understand that perhaps in the same way there is a diaspora of other communities, so too is there one of the Burner crowd. They said that a lot of the community pattern matches on a certain flavour of dress, and if you don’t match then you get othered.
The point of this post is not fashion critique, especially given I’m still in that baby-trans period of not quite knowing how to dress myself, but I definitely did not ‘match’. I guess I had assumed this would have been universally welcomed or celebrated, but it certainly wasn’t. People came up to me and told me how ‘nice and refreshing’ my style was, and it’s not hard to read between the lines of what that means.
After I had a less than great time at FWBFest, the person who invited me told me that ‘we can’t control what people outside of this community do’. At the time I was really hurt by that statement but now I realize it as something that’s even more generally true. Community norms or even a code of conduct are poorly suited to act as any guarantee of controlling behaviour, even within a community.
So next time, one of two things will happen:
If I carry the same vulnerability I did on the boat, I will define and practice some method(s) of dealing with my emotional reactions to gestures of exclusion. I will find some way to avoid hiding in my room.
I will be far more guarded and reticent to being open with people, and treat the next time as an opportunity to be seen and celebrate with old friends rather than on the opportunity to make new ones.
I want the former. A disclaimer for my potential roommates at the next Summit event: I’m not really ‘Crying Girl At Party’, it’s just that sometimes I’m forced to play that role.
All of this being said, now that I’ve had some time to decompress, I think I did get what I needed from the experience. There were exceptional people, many who I did get to converse with. I did make a few new friends. I did have fun (at times).
The most important thing I took away, though, there are no ‘safe spaces’. It doesn’t matter how opulent your container, how exceptional the population therein, humans are still humans. There is no great equalizing force that will prevent someone on the other side of the class moat from giving you a dirty look.
Summit was not all that different from FWBFest (ironic since Alex Zhang was previously part of the Summit leadership team). My expectations were definitely higher, and I wonder if something else to take away is that cis people see the world through their own filter. None of my friends, for example, are afraid to be in public.
My People
Vibecamp 2 is in a few weeks, and I’m very hopeful that it will fill my need for a reset that Summit didn’t. A few people had told me that Summit would be ‘my people’, but I think that title still goes to the Hereticon-TPOT diaspora. One of them reached out to me after some post-Summit sadposting I did and offered some sympathy, commiserating about the downside of normie culture.
What does ‘your people’ really mean? On the surface, it might be people who are like you. Or people who understand you. I think my friends thought Summit would be those people for me because of how they view me. Ego aside (this is what other people have said about me) those people are smart, independent thinking, and ‘special’.
What do other communities like TPOT have that Summit was lacking, this time around? It seems like the answer is ‘judgement on who should be there’. TPOT is amorphous, ‘This Part Of Twitter’ doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s self referential, meaning ‘this group of people’.
There is also status, but I think I kind of had equal-ish status going into Summit. I obviously didn’t quite make the cut on the boat, but I’m ‘in orbit of’ that echelon of TPOT. Grimes is not my bestie, and there are a few Vibecamp after-parties I won’t make it into.
Summit: Normie Vibecamp?
In trying to put some final denouement to my Summit experience, I’ve often drifted back to Vibecamp. To me, Summit was just a cruise where I met a few cool people and got to spend time with friends. To some others, that describes Vibecamp and Vibegala.
I didn’t met a co-founder, or romantic partner, or have a specific life-changing experience at either of the two Vibe* events. Yet, I felt like my experience was a complete and heartful one. The same can be said of Summit, and I feel very differently about the experience. Some measure of personal failing, that one of those things were supposed to happen: That they did not because of something that I did or did not do.
I think a lot of Summit attendees would not enjoy Vibecamp, so I’ve kind of landed on viewing my experience as a first date that didn’t go so well. That doesn’t mean that the community will never be ‘my people’, but that they aren’t right now.