Girl on the Side Essay

Sometimes the only way forward is to step out from the side: a female filmmaker’s story about getting out of her own way.

By Tori Time

Featured on Paus

My father used to say, “You have to put yourself in the game.” His words echoed in my ear. 

I was pulled over on the side of Ocean Ave in Santa Monica waiting to turn into a parking structure. My breath was heavy, fogging my oversized glasses, the ones that make me look like I’m writing for The New Yorker circa the Nora Ephron essay days. At least that’s what I was going for, not that anyone would notice. 

I haven’t seen my dad in a year now, at least not in person. 2020 keeps us at a distance. I called to give him news that the movie I made years before was finally getting released. A new streaming platform called Paus is doing a livestream and Q&A for my film. They want to spend a whole week marketing this event, putting me at the center of it all. Something I’ve always wanted, but my deep-seated fear of being seen kept me and my movie hidden.

God showed up 

            in the rows of a Blockbuster 

            when I was a kid,

            rows of movies, 

            filled with the possibility of God. 

            God showed up 

            as the face of Edward Scissorhands

            when I was 14 years old,

spinning out of control. 

            If I watched it every night,

            God would appear, 

            sending smoke signals of hope.

            God showed up 

            in the movie theater as I watched

            Beasts of the Southern Wild 

            on the big screen, as Hushpuppy said, 

            “I want to be cohesive.”

            I want to be tenacious, 

            connected, cohesive. 

            God is in the movies. 

            I want to make movies. 

           I want to find God.

I’ve always felt like I was living in someone else’s story. I was — you know, that secondary character that the writer didn’t seem to give much attention to their back story, only there to push the protagonist along. Always a bench warmer, never a player. Hiding on the sidelines became my refuge and my prison cell.

Trauma spreads its roots in the dirt,

            affecting all the flowers in bloom. 

            It was my story too, 

            even if I stopped blooming out of view. 

I kept this pattern going into my adult life, going from bench warmer to cheerleader, continuing to raise up someone else’s story instead of my own. I would go on to spend every night on the side of my ex boyfriend’s stand up shows, supporting his up-and-coming career. I might as well have been a Dallas Cowboys’ cheerleader, minus the hot dance moves and the cute little skirt—at least then I would have gotten paid for the job and received some positive male attention. Instead, I had become a prisoner to my funny ex’s career. I had gone invisible all on my own, hiding in the shadows of my sparkly boyfriend. To hell with my own ambitions. 

But after he recited a break up letter to me that he had written on a legal pad, as if our five-year relationship had never happened and my countless nights of being his perfect, doting girlfriend had amounted to no fat severance package, I had to go back to the beginning — all the way back to the beginning. How did I get here? When did I become the girl on the side of someone else’s show? 

 When I looked back, it was arresting to find that the problem wasn’t my ex, but the dark self-worth issues and debilitating fear that I had been perpetuating long before he came around. A series of events in my life had caused me to hide, to hold my breath, to stand on the side in fear of what would happen if I came out from the shadows. I realized my story was a larger one to be told.

Note to self:            

It was me who left your side, 

            in the middle of the night. 

            I let go of your hand, 

            without ever thinking twice. 

            I knew you’d be heartbroken, 

            so here’s my request:

            blame me. 

                        It was me.

So in 2016 I set out to make a short film called Girl on the Side inspired by my personal story and my attempt to make sense at how I had sidelined myself. I had been working under Sam Taylor-Johnson, the top grossing female director at the time, I had been writing every day, and after a trip to New Orleans where I met with Josh Penn, the producer of Beasts of the Southern Wild, I was prepared to do what I had always wanted to do: make a movie. 

 Every stage of the process was a battle within myself. I had trouble taking deep breaths, and my anxiety wasn’t cute or endearing. It was hanging on the side of every move that I made. But I charged on despite my fear, because I knew I had something I needed to say, and that maybe there was one other person out there that needed to hear this story too. 

 I decided early on that I wanted to make Girl on the Side with an all-female crew. I was curious to see what the perspective would be like to have a group of women behind the camera who had all felt a similar way before, because, as we all know, being a bystander or secondary character is all too familiar for many women. And in the film industry, it’s no exception. I wanted to bring more women in filmmaking together, and this seemed like a good place to start. One by one, I attached some of the most incredible, up and coming female filmmakers in this industry to help bring this story to life.

So despite my fear’s desperate attempts to derail me, I made the choice to speak my truth, to step into the messy center of myself, and reclaim my story, no matter how scary that might be. With the help of an amazing group of female filmmakers, we made Girl on the Side. 

Letting go doesn’t happen all at once. 

            It’s the quiet resilience

at the end of the day that whispers,

  “choose me instead.”

In February of 2017, we finished the film. I was so proud of what we made and the powerful point of view we had created as women. 

I began applying to some of the top film festivals and waited to hear where I would screen the film. The ‘Me Too’ movement had now hit and it seemed like the perfect time to share this story as women everywhere were being encouraged to use their voices. But, with each “no” I received from these film festivals, my self-worth and debilitating fear rose back up again like a tsunami. The immense fear I felt from peeking my head out from the comfortable shadows was real, and scary, and validated. I had made a movie about not being seen, and now I didn’t know how to have my film be seen. 

Months turned to years, and flash forward to 2020 and I still hadn’t shared my short film. Something I was once so proud of, I was content to keep in the shadows. The perfectionist inside me said it was better to keep it as a proof of concept for the feature version. I could make the feature film perfect, so no need to share the short. As we know by now, I was comfortable on the sidelines, so my movie should be too, along with everything else I had to say. 

In her TED Talk, Teach Girls Bravery, Not Perfection, Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code, talks about how we are raising our girls to be perfect while we raise our boys to be brave. “Most girls are taught to avoid risk and failure. We’re taught to smile pretty, play it safe, get all A’s. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to play rough, swing high, crawl to the top of the monkey bars, and then just jump off headfirst,” Saujani says. This debilitating perfectionism runs through us, whether it’s hiding our work until it’s “ready,” not applying to a job until we’re 100% qualified, or suffering from body image issues. 

I finished a draft of the feature film a few weeks ago, in the middle of the pandemic that’s been sidelining us all. I was reminded of the skeleton still hiding in my closet—the very personal short film I made with a group of amazing female filmmakers that I was still stashing away in a password protected link on Vimeo like it’s a prisoner in Guantanamo. But I wasn’t only hiding myself. I was hiding an entire group of women’s work in the shadows, which betrayed the reason I wanted to make the film in the first place. That realization hurts more than anything—I stopped myself from celebrating so many incredible women and their beautiful work. 

Sometimes the scariest villains aren’t who we think they are. They’re right under our noses. They’re you and me. I was the hero and the villain of my story. Not my ex-boyfriend, not the film festivals, not any other person or thing I had found my self-worth in over the years. I couldn’t release this short until I found worth in myself first. It was my choice if I was going to play the villain or the hero this time.

The gatekeepers might seem like the film festivals, but sometimes the things holding us back are our own inhibitions. With so many online platforms now, there is no excuse to hide your work. Share your film. Post your poem. Tell your story. Let yourself be seen.

So here we are, at the start of 2021, after a lot of work. I found a home for Girl on the Side, and a seed of self-worth along the way. I contemplated just releasing the short, letting the film speak for itself. But when the team at Paus asked me to talk about my experience, I decided to stick with the integrity of the film. I choose to be brave instead of perfect, to speak my truth, to step into the messy center of myself and own my story no matter how scary that might be. Because when one person speaks their truth to someone, they open up a pathway of connection to allow someone else to do the same. 

Sometimes you build a boy

            into a man and he will leave. 

            But sometimes you build a girl 

into a woman and she will stay.

  I stayed.

If you’re waiting on the sidelines for your life to start, I hope this inspires you to begin again, to blossom, to put yourself in the game. No more staying in line. No more staying confined. No more girls on the side.