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 am a different person right now. Different from a year ago. Different from 6 months ago. Different from 60 days ago. I have getting completely, totally, frighteningly lost in Italy to thank.
Imagine this: I get on a train at Milani Garibaldi on a Thursday afternoon heading to a piazza that is supposed to be on one of the old canals of Milano. The pictures I had seen on various travel blogs made it seem like the inspiration for a scene in a Disney movie - how could I not go?
It’s a beautiful northern Italian day. Low 80s. Hardly a single cloud in the sky. Less humid than usual. I’m in my trademark black outfit. Skinny black jeans. Unusually hemmed black tee. Black sunnies. I pull up some directions to this beloved location on Google Maps and I confirm with the train conductor to see if I’m headed in right direction. When he assures me, I waste no time buying the ticket and boarding the train.
Alt-J in my ears, I zone out for 5 stops, careful to listen for the familiar bing noise that comes over the speaker right before arriving at the next station. One. Bing. Two. Bing. Three. Bing. Four. Bing. Five. Bing. Get up and get off that train. Transportation is simultaneously the hardest and most universal thing about travel.
When I get off the tracks, I put my music away so I can pay attention to the careful directions I read online when I still had WiFi. No WiFi anywhere here. Believe me, I check. Incessantly. To the point where my phone battery is almost dead from scanning for hot spots. Instead, I must rely on my memory and gut instincts. Go right, past the fields of green and then turn right when you see a bus stop. There should be a T in the road.
After 25 minutes of walking and no right turns and no Ts in the road, I knew something was up. Sweaty from that 80 degree sun that no longer felt delightful and completely alone in the middle of nowhere, I started laughing. I was trying not to panic. I was desperate not to cry. I was hoping I wasn’t getting wickedly sunburned. Every single degree of the 360 degrees of space around me was just grass. Dying, beat down, fields of grass making way for autumn as summer slowly passed.
Where in the actual hell was I?
Totally lost.
It was just a field. Surrounded by empty nothing. I had walked so far, I couldn’t even see the train station anymore. This place was so random, so remote, that it could have easily been the set for an abandoned farming plot of a lost community out of a dystopian novel. So now what? Seriously, now what? There was no one to ask. There was no using my smartphone. There was only walking back.
So I started walking back.
Here’s my advice: If you have never forced yourself to be ALONE, truly alone, for at least three days - you MUST do it.
And here’s why.
When you are forced to spend that much time alone (or in my case, 34 days alone), you are forced to see your life from a new perspective. You are forced to see yourself from a new perspective. Ideally, you’ll be so far from home that your phone won’t operate properly so you can’t reach out for comfort when you get lonely. You’ll be so committed to this journey that you won’t allow yourself to pay the exorbitant data fees for using your phone. And hopefully, you’ll be ready, even if you aren’t ready. And you might get lost. Actually, you will probably get lost. It will suck. It will be scary. But it is the big fish you have been trying to catch. It is the thing you were looking for and didn’t even know it. Because when you reel that in, you can see what you were hoping was on the line.
Maybe that metaphor is out of control, so let’s put it more simply: Even though limited access to my phone, loneliness, unconnectedness and fear were the very things that bit me in the ass when I was standing out in the middle of that field, they were also the things that forced me to dig deep and actually see myself. Not a reflection. An inflection. An inner observation of my real worth. My real strength. My real will.
I walked the long ass walk back to the train station and waited for a train headed back to Milano.
I never found the piazza. I did find a bit of myself.
beinggeekchic posted this