Being Geek Chic is a blog about one woman navigating the male-dominated industries of production and tech. It's written by Elizabeth Giorgi, Founder, CEO and Director of Mighteor - one of the world's first internet video production companies. Learn more about Mighteor here.
I’ve spent a lot of my time lately thinking about what it means to have a good attitude in the face of painful things. Like having a good attitude about the future even when we’re worried about the big world outside looking uncertain. Or coming to work with an assumption of progress and joy, even when projects are late or budgets are tight. Or just allowing ourselves to feel good when we’ve been swimming in a pool of bad for a while.
It’s the decision to Choose Up.
To choose to lift yourself up. To choose to lift your community up. To choose to lift someone else up. Not because you have to. But because you know deep down that choosing up is the right thing to do for us all.
It would be easy to say that this is just some petty play at positivity. I understand that. But actually, hear me out, because it’s not.
In the last year, I was hospitalized, lost my beloved stepmother suddenly, went through the pain of sudden widowing with my father, went through legal hell, supported my partner through an equally unimaginable death and all the while tried to hold myself together for my business. It was a heavy year. And a heavy time in my life.
There were moments where the bottom felt like it had no ending. Where I would seriously find myself thinking: “What the fuck? How does this get worse?”
And in those moments I would get the same pleasantries that we all get from our family and friends. I would hear things like: “This too shall pass.” And “If you have a positive attitude, good things will come.”
But all I could imagine was this moment, right now, with the pain and the questions and the fear. And somewhere along the way - I started saying to myself. “I just gotta get one step up from this dark bottom.”
See, I stopped aiming for the impossible - blissful happiness. Joy. A carefree feeling.
And as soon as I stopped wanting for those big, lofty dreams of the heart and mind - I started to be able to focus on what I could move forward with in that moment. I started to see that I could make my way up - one small choice at a time.
By choosing to just compliment someone for no reason.
By choosing to go to bed an hour earlier and allow myself to rest.
By choosing to be happy about the perfect coffee.
These small little moments were my way of choosing up. Because it was all the control I could muster over my mental and emotional well being.
And it parallels nicely with my new vision of my career as a woman entrepreneur in a time where things seem uncertain on a global scale. I don’t have the patience or the capacity to drown in that fear. So instead I choose up.
That was the theme of my conversation last week with Lizelle VV of Women Who Startup as part of our new Mighteor Monday live stream. And it’s the theme of my entire next quarter at my business. We are going to focus on choosing up for one another. Because it’s the right thing to do.
I know that our minds can’t always control where we are at. Believe me, the prescriptions I stare at tell me this too. But I do believe that part of every healing journey is in making choices. And this isn’t a compass. The directions are 2 dimensional. There are other choices. There are directions that we didn’t even know we could define in a cardinal way. Choose a direction that makes your life better.
Every time a new year rolls around, I find myself wistfully wondering: what did I learn this year that I can take into the next year? Most years, it’s very tangible things: I learned to crochet or how to do a certain type of animation. But this year? This year is all heady stuff about being a woman person.
THINGS I LEARNED ABOUT BEING A WOMAN IN 2015:
1. Being Brave Pays Off in Confidence. When self-help gurus and therapists and miscellaneous humans in your social circle talk about bravery, they are probably talking about going on a scary hike. Or running a marathon in the winter. Or confronting an estranged family member. Accomplishing those things will pay off in confidence - so the same principle is applied. But what they often aren’t talking about is those moments when you’re stretching beyond your own knowns and exploring the confines of your own emotional bandwidth. There is no hike in the world that is more scary than facing your demons. But facing them is worth it.
2. Friendship is NOT Optional. My girlfriends are the reason I am happy and healthy and feel full of hope. Isolating oneself doesn’t work. Friendship does. <3
3. Getting Sexed will not make you FEEL Sexier. As a single woman, it can be really easy to assume that getting laid will be the answer. One night stands and random make out sessions can be a blast. I am not anti-getting sexed. But do it for the right reason. And do it because it’s fun. The alternative is depressing.
4. You Can Live on Luna Bars, Coffee and Bananas. In the months when I wasn’t sure where I was living, I didn’t want to buy groceries, because storing them seemed like such a pain. For three months, this was my diet. I didn’t die.
5. Binging TV Will Actually Help You Get Over Your Ex. Every breakup requires an escape. For me, it’s always been a good TV show. Depending on how long the relationship lasted or how deep you got into it, you will need to pick a TV show that can heal those hurts. For me, it’s Sex and the City, Parks and Rec and Scandal. Always gets me through.
6. Happiness is a Practice. Make choices every day to be happy. Before you know it, it will add up like a savings account of joy. (With interest.)
7. Speaking Your Mind Comes with a Cost. You Should ALWAYS Pay It. When my mentor did the impossibly brave thing of coming out publicly as a whistleblower in a sex scandal, it blew my mind. Her public pain was on headlines across the country. But it caused change. It opened a conversation. She didn’t deserve it. But she did the right thing when she had to. For that, I admire the hell out of her.
8. Adventure is Never a Bad Idea. Planning my 5-week trip to Italy was easy. Actually getting on the plane to spend that many days alone in a foreign country was totally insane. I regret none of it.
9. When Things Don’t Go as Planned, Say Fuck the Plan. Nothing went as planned this year. It went better.
10. Dreams Aren’t Handed Out. They are Crafted, Created and Carefully Tended To. Four years ago, I started dreaming about starting my own business. Today, when I go to my office every day, I feel so proud that it actually happened. However, there were so many times where I’ve wanted to quit. Thank goodness I didn’t. Those moments were key. By pushing through the hard times, I made my dream even better.
It doesn’t matter if it’s your career, your vacation or your relationship - everyone has expectations. Hopefully, if you have a fairly positive outlook on life, you have high expectations for yourself, your mentors, friends, colleagues and partners. That’s human nature. And it’s actually super healthy.
But the trouble with life is that dreaming these dreams and imagining our ideal idea is not a promise that things will go the way you want them to. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for it. It just means: keep an open mind, because if things don’t go as planned, you need to be able to treat yourself kindly in those moments.
When things go wrong, you will feel so frustrated with yourself for having goals. You will feel like a failure. You may feel ashamed and embarrassed, as I have many times. You may even be convinced that you are the reason things failed. And you may be the reason. But, also, maybe not.
And that’s the whole point.
When people give life advice, they often talk about how you should just keep striving. People will tell you to just forge ahead even when your literal worst case scenario is your day to day life. These people are trying really hard to help you, because they care about you. They want to give you a methodology to survive this moment in time somehow. Other people, like your friends, family, colleagues and random strangers will be SO nice to you. And that helps. It does. BUT! Surviving sometimes means being really, really, absurdly kind to yourself too. Buying the new shoes. Repeating positive, happy thoughts all the time. Going on that dream vacation you’ve been putting off. Or really, sometimes, it’s just avoiding the blame cloud until you’re ready to do healthy self-reflection without the raw, fresh emotions hanging overhead.
So…
When your dream job is more of a nightmare than you could have imagined - that’s OK. Treat yourself kindly.
When your vacation isn’t going as planned and it rains the whole damn time - that’s OK. Treat yourself kindly.
When you don’t get into the college you always wanted to attend - that’s OK. Treat yourself kindly.
When your blog doesn’t go anywhere after you’ve invested so much time - that’s OK. Treat yourself kindly.
When you lose all your money on a grand business bet - that’s OK. Treat yourself kindly.
When your perfect apartment is also right next door to crazy party animals and you have to move - that’s OK. Treat yourself kindly.
When your face decides to break out on the big day of your photo shoot - that’s OK. Treat yourself kindly.
When you give your heart to someone and the relationship still fails - that’s OK. Treat yourself kindly.
The ONLY responsibility you have as a person is to look at yourself kindly and move forward with the same amount of positivity, grace and goodness as you had before things didn’t work out.
That’s HOW you’ll be OK.
It’s easy to forget that people who are cute and adorable can hold awful biases inside their heads. This doesn’t make them a bad person, just someone who maybe needs to think a little bit about their opinions and what they mean to others. For whatever reason, encountering trolls on the internet, is well, easier. You don’t have to see their face, their eyes or their smile. You can’t make any assumptions about them based on what they’re wearing or how good of a hair day they’re having.
I was reminded of this last week when I had the pleasure of doing on the street shoot for a client and we were asking people questions about their various opinions on some legislative issues of the day. I was shocked how many people freely used terms like “That’s retarded.” or “Nah, I think that’s gay.” I was so upset by this. I know I should have been less thrown off by it, but I just couldn’t help it. I literally forgot that people say shitty shit EVEN WHEN they aren’t hiding behind a computer screen.
Luckily, I was hanging out with my friend Sarah Von Bargen of Yes and Yes fame that day and she gave me a stellar tip that was shared with her and I’m now passing on to you:
When someone says something offensive to you, literally pretend like you didn’t hear them and say: “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”
The person that passed this expert approach to deescalating ugly reported that very few people actually repeat their less than kind comment a second time. And if someone is willing to think about what they said for an addition 2 seconds and then are given the chance to repeat it and STILL do, that’s a good indicator that the person you are hanging out with is perhaps not worth spending time with.
I started thinking about this simple response more and I honestly think that it can work for deescalating trolls on the internet too, with some minor modifications of course. So here’s how I plan to respond to all future internet trolls:
When someone tweets or posts or comments something offensive at me, I will say: “I’m sorry, did you want to say that again?”
Admittedly, it’s more aggressive. And it’s more direct. But, the truth is that if someone is willing to take a second and think about it and respond the same way, it’s not only a good indication that this is a person who needs to be blocked, but it gives them the chance to think about their actions one more time and reconsider their words.
Shutting down trolls is an unfortunate reality of living and working in the internet age, which is why I am sort of numb to it in my daily interactions on the web. But when it happens in face to face interactions, it hurts more. it feels more aggressive. And it can be even more shocking, which means it can be difficult to know how to react. By having this simple one-sentence response in my back pocket, I hope to shut down more nastiness in the world.
How do you shut down trolls or trollish statements when you hear them in real life or online?
