Building Gentler Entry Points to Creative Community

When I moved to a new city, I expected loneliness, not in a dramatic way, just the quiet kind. The kind where you’re surrounded by people, events, scenes, and yet still feel strangely on the outside of everything. This anonymity is often something I’ve enjoyed and craved at times, but as a creator I was starting to feel my creative ideas and delusions cannibalize themselves in my mind.

I’m a creative person, born a natural blonde with a wand and covered in glitter. I know how to talk, I know how to show up. But when anxiety knocks, he has a way of shrinking the room before even entering it. Overthinking the introduction, going in for the handshake-turned-hug-fist-pump or virtual ‘hey! What’s up’. Reaching out to new people feels impossible even though I’m lingering on their stories and posts for weeks and know everything about them. Slowly, potential connections fade before they’ve even had a chance to exist.

As I’ve forced myself to push through this feeling, I’ve managed to have more and more conversations with creatives around me and I’ve realized it’s a common reality for a lot of us. Face-to-face connection often feels heavy and networking feels performative. Even community can feel inaccessible when you’re already carrying self-doubt, pressure, or social anxiety.

Together with Lenovo + Intel, we built the Make Space Network because of that gap. Not to replace real connection, but to soften the hardest part: the beginning. Leveraging AI to help connect like-minded creatives, the tool removes some of the friction and fear that stops people from reaching out in the first place. It creates a gentler entry point, one where you’re not shouting into the void or forcing yourself into rooms that don’t feel right.

Creativity doesn’t thrive in isolation, it needs mirrors, conversations, shared momentum. Sometimes all it takes is one aligned connection to unlock something that’s been stuck for months. This tool exists because I know what it’s like to want creative community and still feel blocked from it. Because anxiety shouldn’t be the thing that kills collaboration. We deserve spaces that help us feel less alone and more brave in letting creativity move and evolve between us.