Brooke Brazer

I am grateful for the support of my partner, family, and in part, I would say that a silver lining of having a debilitating chronic illness is that it did kind of force me out of a career that I was less passionate about, and gave me the courage to pursue something that I enjoyed more. When you're not well most of the time, you have to be intentional about how you're spending your time when you do feel well. If you're feeling well, but you're doing a job that you don't enjoy or not passionate about, that can feel more draining, so being able to spend time on projects that I am passionate about when I'm feeling well, and just making the most of that time.

I don't know if it's that I've received it, but the impression I have is that you sometimes just have to take a chance on yourself and go after what you believe in, and not being afraid to take a career pivot.

With regards to my creative role, I would say don't be afraid to pilot and pivot. If you have a creative idea, a lot of times people have high taste, but they maybe don't have the ability to execute, and the only way to bridge that gap is to continue to execute. Basically, in other words, as you continue to make your art and make work, you will only get better and better, but you have to not be too judgmental of the early work that you're putting out. You can pilot it, and you can always learn from it, and you will iterate and get better over time.

The biggest challenge for endometriosis awareness is that there's a lot of misinformation out there. It's not just raising awareness about the disease, but also correcting a lot of misinformation that is out there and perpetuated by physicians and other organizations, and so making sure that other people who have this condition are given the correct resources and able to put themselves on a path toward healing sooner. With regards to creative producing, I work in the vertical space, like media that's consumed on your phone versus on a television or movie screen, and I think that this is a new industry, and so there's a lot of maybe skepticism or uncharted territory with regards to making media content that's vertical. We're kind of in a new frontier, but I would say that there is certainly a lot of an uphill battle in terms of getting the credibility and understanding that vertical storytelling is still storytelling.

Authenticity, effective communication, collaboration, kind of a team effort, and not being afraid to be scrappy.