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.
If the memes on Twitter are any indication, 2016 has been rough for a lot of us. For me, it’s been painful. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved this year, but the huge professional successes seemed to drown in the shadow of my personal life. I wish I could say that I feel like everything has leveled out, but even now, my personal struggles often prevent me from seeing the beautiful world that is around me.
As a result, I have spent a lot of 2016 on the treadmill and at yoga reminding myself why I need to be optimistic about the future. Here are a few I thought I’d share with you in hopes that you’ll find some reasons to be optimistic as we say goodbye to what has been a rough year for nearly everyone, it seems.
If you haven’t taken the time to try and find the things that you’re grateful for in 2016, be wise and take the time. Grief and pain and loss are part of life always - and sometimes the most painful parts of life all stack up. But, the thing that will make us survive the downs are realizing that the ups have happened and they will CONTINUE to happen.
When I started my business, I had a simple goal for achieving work/life balance: I was going to make sure I took time out to blog every week. (On this here, blog, no less.) It would be a way to ensure that I didn’t lose sight of myself. It was a promise to stay focused on things that made me happy so I didn’t only focus on things that made me money. I’ve failed.
When you start a company, people give you this look. I call it the “good luck, kid” look. It’s part pride, part fear, part hope and part skepticism. The funny thing is that their face is the physical manifestation of your insides. You are feeling all those things. Do they really feel that way or is it a projection? Is that that why you see what you see on their face?
Fast forward to today when I have five people on payroll, a new office, plans for expansion and an actual business with actual revenue. Now, people ask a different question: “how’s business?” And I give them a look that I call, “Can you tell I’m silently drowning in the confusingly endless ocean that is running a small business?” face. You feel this because things are going well. But invariably, if things are going well - that also means that things are very, very busy.
Which brings me to not writing. The other day in between the madness of finishing one project and trying to get to a meeting and make sure I got to the bank and achieved one of the other 100 things on my list, I realized that I was feeling unhappy. The amount of stress, people management and planning that had become my day to day life was overwhelming me. And all I wanted to do was sit down and do nothing.
This is because people management is not why I started my business.
Project coordination is not why I started my business.
Financial planning is not why I started my business.
But all these things were now my job. And since my job is so tightly interwoven with how I see myself and think about my place in the world, I suddenly felt totally out of place inside my own company. I can tell you first hand: that’s a bizarre feeling. For a few weeks, I’ve charged ahead, acknowledging that sometimes having a business that does what you love means you gotta do a lot more business than the thing that you love to make it survive.
However, that can only last so long before a total identity crisis sets in.
I’ve known a lot of overachievers in my life. In business. In corporate careers. In college. We all have this really big thing in common: we equate achievement with our personal value. If we’re not doing well, our value to the world plummets. When we’re killing it, well, our value to our employers and our friends and our partners is at its peak. Actions are everything. Proving to yourself and others that you can take on a challenge is the drug. And you want to experience the high.
In running my business, I’ve realized that no matter how much money you are making, no matter how happy your clients are, no matter how talented your team is becoming and no matter how successful you have become - exhaustion kills the joy. Without proper rest, nutrition, time off and just general balance, you will completely kill any and all of the high.
I won’t say I don’t love Mighteor. Or production. Or what we are doing as a team. Or the projects we are working on. I do. I love this business and all the people that make it a thing.
But, I am so tired.
And that’s confusing. Because identity is something we all struggle with, but for someone like me, pushing myself into what I do for my work is how I always manage those ups and downs. Now my work IS the ups and downs.
This weekend, I’m going to take my first real days off that I’ve had in 2.5 months. I’ve worked every weekend for 8 weeks straight. And to make myself step away, I had to book a damn flight and buy concert tickets. Otherwise, it was never gonna happen. But I also hope to reconnect with the part of myself that finds happiness and hope outside of the business.
Who knows, maybe I’ll even start a journal again.
Because the thing about identities is that we can always change them.
My first business was a blueberry stand. While my friends and I had tried countless times to run successful weekend campaigns for lemonade stands, I noticed that the revenue on those operations were abysmal from the beginning. Instead, I focused on picking blueberries at my grandparent’s place with my dad. My brother and I would sell a cup of blueberries for $2 on our corner on 10th Street South. And the first weekend we did it, we made $48. Not bad for a couple of kids.
It should be no surprise to anyone then when in the 6th grade, I asked my mom if I could be businesswoman for Halloween. She let me borrow one of her only suits. And I traded the traditional plastic pumpkin for a briefcase for the occasion. I had no idea what businesswomen did all day, but I felt completely comfortable in that costume.
Despite all these signs, I had no idea I wanted to go into business when I started looking at colleges. I focused entirely on writing and journalism programs, because deep down, writing has always been my first calling. Or maybe it was my first medicine. I wrote when I was sad. I wrote when I was happy. I wrote when I fell in love. I wrote when I got my heart broken. I wrote to process my feelings. And I wrote to make myself feel safe.
Writing felt like this deep passion. I couldn’t help but believe that when people say: “turn your passion into your career and you’ll never work a day in your life” - that they were speaking to me. That’s the funny thing about platitudes. They apply until they don’t.
After finishing my journalism program and attempting to use my skills at the keyboard for good and a paycheck, I quickly burnt out on the constant screen time. I felt a constant longing to get out of my cubicle and into the world. I still remember turning to the cube next to me where our cameraman Justin worked and asking him to please, please let me go out on a shoot with him. He obliged. And today I’m so grateful. Having the intuition to ask for an opportunity opened the doors to what I wanted to do for the rest of my career.
Even after you find something to do with your career, it’s no guarantee that you actually know yourself. It turns out that knowing yourself is a process. The interior of the mind like a snow globe, constantly changing as new flakes and glitter distort the picture of life, the future and perception. Even now, I’m aware that my interior world is changing and evolving by the minute.
But that costume. Those blueberries. They were like veiled insights into who I am and who I was going to become that I had’t seen yet. And when the longing towards entrepreneurship initially took hold in my mind, I wasn’t even sure that it was the right decision. It took two years of studying my mentors who owned their own businesses for me to find the bravery to step into forming my own business.
I think about those blueberries far more often than I care to admit. Partially because wild blueberries in Minnesota are a rare, rare delight - nothing like what you buy in the plastic pints at the store. But more often because I wonder what things are taking hold in my own life now that I may not be noticing, serving as waving flags towards a future I have yet to imagine for myself.
Too many times, I have heard myself say to others: “what is the world putting in front of you that you can take advantage of if you’re just brave enough to try?” while knowing full well that I was scheming and plotting inside my mind to try and plan the perfect thing. Trying not to just jump into the thing in front of me, but rather, have a plan A, B, C and D.
There is no planning blueberries. Blueberries just happen.
Fact: I write about my life. I’m not an open book. But I’m definitely a mildly opaque one. And sometimes, mining my life for content, actually works out pretty damn well for me.
At least it did last week.
On Thursday, I got some really big, totally huge news. The screenplay I wrote while in Italy last summer was selected as a finalist for Seattle International Film Festival’s first Catalyst Screenwriting Competition. It’s exciting for a number of rather huge reasons: first, it was an artistic validation unlike anything I had ever experienced before. Second, it feels like the crazy chance I took diving into writing for a few weeks and stepping away from my business was actually worth it.
When you run a small business, even a creative one, taking a vacation can seem like an absurd luxury. And while I want to go into the reasons why it’s imperative that even new #girlbosses step away from their work and relax once in a while, I’ll save that for another day. Instead, I want to focus on that bit about validation.
The script, Private Parts, is about modern dating in the age of sharing digital nudes before we even know someone’s middle name. It’s a portrait of contemporary intimacy, if you will. And inside that script are about four different men that I dated in the last year before meeting my current beau, R. Of course their names were all changed, but their role in my life and the way that I saw them as people is all there. And while I could feel guilty about including their stories and their qualities with the world, I don’t. And to be honest, I refuse to. Because here’s the thing: I don’t hide what I do. And what I do, is create.
Recently, I asked R: “How would you feel if I wrote about you?” His answer was simple: “Just don’t do it on the blog.” Who knows what is in our future, but already I know where our story begins. And that’s what I love most about my life right now. For the first time, I feel like I understand why we keep doing this even when we don’t get validation from the powers that be. It’s because I don’t know how to live my life any other way. I don’t even know how to date without knowing that I will probably need to write about it later.
The big heartbreaks? Catalogued in history in ways that are implicit and subtle. The strange sexual interactions? Remembered forever through various characters whose names all start with the letter E. The bizarre encounters between humans just trying to figure it out? Still being worked out privately in Final Draft. One particular ex is everywhere. He’s in Private Parts. He’s in my upcoming short film, Victoriana. And I could feel bad, but that’s what you get for cheating.
But here’s what is so surprising: the artistic validation feels so much more powerul than the closure I received from processing that experience through my writing. I never want to be cheated on again, but I’ll tell you this: I am weirdly delighted that it happened. The source material has provided immeasurable motivation. Just ask Beyonce.
