My Ego Death. My Self-Renaissance.

Welcome,

This blog post is dedicated to all of the business owners and solopreneurs out there who have dreams, have perhaps experienced some failures, have pivoted or are yet to pivot, who have been humbled or will someday experience being humbled by their own creations.

Welcome to my chaotic rendition of the most recent update on living in Europe. This experience has completely changed me and helped bring me back to my favourite parts of myself. Travelling through Europe has taught me a lot and I’m excited to be vulnerable with you.

To start, I want you to know I am so happy to have you here.

In the midst of my travels, I have been experiencing a period of profound growth. The quiet and open space has allowed my mind to go into different places and I would love to share them with you.

When I first left Australia in the middle of the year, I was burned out, stressed and lost. I was so burned out I ordered a burrito from the inside of my closet. I have a vivid recollection of staring at a wall for a solid 30 minutes. All I have to remember is “white”. It’s kinda funny for me to think of it now but it was time for me to re-evaluate some things.

Before leaving, it felt like my whole identity as an artist and a businessperson was falling apart because I had decided to take a break from my business. One of my closest friends said to me, “I thought you were doing so well”, but I was breaking and would spend a lot of time being quite confused.

After periods of deep thought, I shared the way I was feeling with other photographers and realised I wasn’t alone. Beyond photographers, the more I talked with different artists the more I realised and could acknowledge I was in the midst of a very human experience. It’s okay for you dreams to change. It doesn’t mean you have failed. It’s okay to not know who you are. Frankly, I can probably hardly recognise who I was in July.

I was on a call to someone recently who was going through a career change from being an artist and he said, “It’s like walking through a grocery store. You have this ingredient list of all the things you want to buy and by the end of the grocery trip, your cart is full. You have gone there to do what you wanted to do. Your dream isn’t broken because you are no longer doing it, perhaps your dream has been fulfilled”. Profound, right? I am still protesting my impending pivot that is headed my way when I get home.

I’ve always been a dreamer.

When I first started out as a photographer, at 10, I did it because I was simply obsessed with it. Over the years I would go towards and away from my camera but the art I could create with it was always something I came back to.

The funny thing is, since being away I’ve started looking at the romantic European paintings differently. I look at them and go, “How could I do that?”.

When I have had business ideas lately, I have been able to lie in bed and my mind becomes alight with different colours that could go together. The game is just changing for me. I sound like an actual crazy person saying this but it has been a cool experience. I used to be able to play videos in my mind how I would make a video of something if I shot it but I haven’t lay in bed and thought about a creative concept for a photoshoot for a long time.

When I was 16, I was fortunate to get a loan that would take me approximately 12 or so months to pay off. At the time, I was on $20 / hr, would work in clubs, and would have to re-edit albums if they weren’t done correctly (this is a full process for non-photographers), if things weren’t in writing I found I might not get paid and sometimes the police would show up at the more “sketchy events” if not shut them down. I could go on, but I came to the resolution at the time that if I ever ran a business, I would never treat anyone that way. It became my goal to create a safe haven for photographers for the next seven years. Since being away, I’ve realised I don’t need to be a business owner to help other people.

In the 5 months before I left for Europe, my team and I did over 80+ shoots. I photographed weddings, elopements, proposals, engagements, and families, we hit our first five-figure month, I got flown out to the outback for a news company to photograph a famous festival, photographed A-list celebrity performances, photographed the Wiggles, I met CEOs, met epic artists and even a photographed a private rehearsal by the Queensland Ballet for a client.

Through this time, aside from my development as a photographer, I spent thousands researching marketing for my business, trialling different administrators and trying a myriad of different systems to use in my business. I re-invested over $30,000 into all the things I needed to make my business and I work (researchers, administrators and all of the things we need to function). Although I was doing more work, I wasn’t properly updating my business prices with my growth as a business and this would be a problem later.

Despite all of this, I found no matter where you are in the world whether you’re in Europe or Australia, it will perplex people when you tell them what you do. Unless people are in the know, I can look like I’ve just told them I work as a professional clown as a job or that I’m secretly a unicorn. Artists are unpredictable, un-boxable, non-linear creatures and society has a tough time deciding which box they want to put us in.

When I was first starting out and going to those entrepreneurial workshops I thought I would become a legit businessperson if I became a 6-figure photographer. As a sixteen-year-old on $20/hr, I thought about how it would be possible to do that revenue-wise. It’s a crazy thought for a photographer and a 16-year-old. This year, with everything I spent on re-investing in my business I realised there’s a big difference between revenue and profit (I study business and I cannot tell you how dumbfounded I was at myself). All of the mistakes I made this year in my business taught me I needed to humble myself, accept my mistakes and focus on educating myself.

In all of this, I realised I had become too involved in my own ego. I had to go through an ego death to come to where I am now. I was in the midst of an ego death and it suuuuuuuuuucked. What’s the thing they say, “What got me here is not what will get me to the next era of myself”. In my ego death, I am allowing myself to dream of what I really want to do.

This is what my ego death taught me

I want to solve problems. What problems can I solve? This changed my perspective because I started to expand my thinking outside of being a photographer. I started to listen to podcasts with a new frame of thinking. I listened to a podcast about endocrine disrupters and I went, I wonder if I could create a website with all hormone-safe products that don’t affect people’s gut microbiomes. It let me think outside of the box.

I want to help people. I don’t need to run a business to help people as an employer. How can I help people? I went, well if I can’t help people by employing them - what if I started a podcast and just started talking to people and if a struggling photographer listens to it then I can help them. I can create a space for people to share ideas that help people.

I want to share love with people I love. How can I share my art with the people I really care about? Who do I really care about? Well, I love my family and close friends - what if I printed out my art when I got home and shared it with them? What if I stopped posting my art online? What if I started to just share my art in person like people did in the 90s? I allowed myself to imagine having close friends and family out in a park with my art displayed on canvases.

I want to do so many things it makes me feel overwhelmed. What is most important to me? The most important thing to me is I concentrate all my attention on one thing for a period of time so I can give it the best chance of succeeding. What do I do with all of the other things I want to do? I extend my timeline for success. I created a ten year table and added all the things that aren’t immediately important that I want to achieve at some stage (doing an art exhibition, starting a podcast for photography business owners, photographing the met, photographing a fashion show in Europe, being the CEO of a scaled photography business, having an office with a studio that I could rent out). This meant that I no longer had to pressure myself into achieving all of it in 2024. I had to lengthen my timeline for success.

I am only limited by my own belief in myself. How do I build a belief in myself? I think it starts with proving to yourself you can do the small things.

I got insanely burned out trying to do everything before, I can’t sacrifice myself again in pursuit of my career. How can I create different boundaries for myself? Okay, I need to stop doing events outside of 9:00am to 5:00pm hours unless it’s a high-profile event that requires me.

This whole personal experience has been incredibly humbling for me. I acknowledge the things I have shared are not things I necessarily take pride in. I think I should perhaps be ashamed of some of the things I have said and the things I thought were important, but I am figuring it out.

Thanks for being vulnerable with me. I do this so that in your own journey, you may also feel less isolated and alone in the pursuit of your dreams we perhaps cannot see but have in our bodies.

Gracie