This was the summer of meeting up at the beach to talk about artificial intelligence. My good friend shakes out her towel and says she thinks she’s losing her brother to the manosphere. We decide he’s young, impressionable, and probably just looking for a way to belong.
I don’t know much about the manosphere. I assume it’s those entrepreneurs-in-cars who pop up on my feed and call me a femcel. From what I gather, it’s about men falling behind in education and earning capacity, and an existential resentment about not being able to give birth. I can relate to the latter. It’s a strange feeling to put a full stop on millions of years of ancestral evolution.
But it’s hard to reconcile the mean-spirited online personas with the men I know in real life, who are so often gentle, thoughtful, and kind.
Maybe this is the backlash against feminism we were warned about, which would explain why I’ve been working through my neglected stack of feminist theory. I like the idea that feminism returns as needed.
Lately, I’ve been reading Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, her 1970 exploration of how women’s limited perceptions of ourselves shape our lives.
I especially liked the chapter on romance, where she describes how romantic stories soothe women — how they offer escape from the drudgery of unpaid emotional and domestic labour. Greer writes that romantic storytelling flourished among bored homemakers alongside the invention of the printing press.
She says men don’t understand how deeply entrenched women are in romantic fantasy. But I think the womanizers probably do. And the drearier my schedule, the more susceptible I become to wishful thinking — romance becomes a kind of escape hatch: a fantasy of being chosen, seen, swept away.
On the drive home from the beach, windows down and music up, I wonder if the answer isn’t to shut the door on romance completely, but to meet it with open eyes. After all, the romantic brain is millions of years old, older than language itself, wired to light up at the possibility of connection.
And maybe there’s a romance, too, in becoming.
In knowing ourselves better.
In trusting our bodies.
In expressing our creativity.
In living beyond the need to be saved.
What the TikTokers might call “main character energy.”
The sun is warm on my face, the wind in my hair, the sand from the afternoon still between my toes. For now, I’m finally content in the quiet romance of my own life.
Field Notes from a motel room in Mission—between film sets, apple boxes, and petting a show pony’s nose.
This week we’re working in Mission, staying at the Best Western between long days on set. I’m just heading to bed, watching A Beautiful Mind. The secret service is definitely up to something, as usual. Russell Crowe gives his students a math problem that will take all semester to solve, then Jennifer Connelly asks him out, then they make out—and I don’t know what happens after that, because I fell asleep.
Running around dressing actors in the wilderness, petting horses, and questioning all my life choices is exhausting. In between, in film life, we hurry up and suntan, half-perched on apple boxes. And somehow, I still find myself loving the adventure of movie-making. The fresh air. The sunshine. The new friends and co-collaborators.
I keep thinking about that Carl Jung quote I posted above my desk at home:
“If the way before you is clear, you’re likely on someone else’s path.”
As my head hits the pillow, a feeling washes over me: maybe it’s okay not to have everything perfectly worked out.
Maybe a little uncertainty is how we know we’re on the right track.
#clarity #Carljung #uncertainty #moviemagic #righttrack #curiosity #unfolding #Bestwestern #abeautifulmind
This past summer, a volleyball shoulder injury left me restless—relegated to reading autobiographies of the stars in my backyard.
I’ve always loved those books with a glossy middle section: select black-and-white photographs, carefully chosen, like clues to study. The Lauren Bacall memoir I picked up at the thrift store was so worn it began to fall apart as I turned the pages.
What struck me most was Bacall’s sheer determination—and her family’s unwavering support. That love seemed to give her the confidence to stand on street corners hoping to meet producers, to say yes to small roles that went nowhere. She was so nervous she threw up before her first screen test. When her big break finally came, her mother moved across the country to live with her and waited up when she stayed out late with Humphrey Bogart.
It reminded me how often we only see the polished version of the people we admire. The glamour. The highlight reel. But behind the scenes, there are quiet support systems, false starts and long pauses. Rejections and missed calls.
There’s something comforting about knowing even our idols get nervous. That they worry, work, love, and long—just like we do.
So there I was, lying in the grass, an ice pack on my shoulder, sun warming my face, remembering: part of being human is failing, fumbling, and sometimes feeling miserable….
