About Me

For much of my life, movies were where I felt most at home. Long before I fully understood myself, I found pieces of myself in the characters on screen. Watching films wasn’t simply entertainment. It was a way to connect with people, emotions, and experiences that often felt slightly out of reach in my own life.

For a long time, I moved through the world feeling as though I were watching my own life from behind glass, like a supporting character in a story that never quite felt like mine. But in the darkness of a movie theater, things were different. Through the journeys of others, I came to understand my own.

It didn’t matter how different their lives were from mine. I noticed reflections of myself in characters across completely different worlds. Through them, I learned to understand not only who I was, but also the people around me. Movies became a way of developing empathy for lives and experiences far removed from my own. Film also became the place where I allowed myself to feel things I had kept buried for a long time. Through these stories, I slowly began to understand myself with greater clarity and compassion.

I first saw myself most profoundly in Ennis Del Mar when I watched Brokeback Mountain during my college years, a time when I struggled deeply to accept who I was. Eleven years later, which seemed like a full circle moment, I watched Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight. Around that same time, I began dating the man who would eventually become my husband. A month later, after years of trying to understand myself, I came out to my family. What once appeared far away finally felt real. At that moment, I realized that my support system of family and friends looked far more like Elio’s in Call Me by Your Name than the isolation I once feared, the kind of loneliness I associated with Conrad in Ordinary People.

Cinema didn’t just shape my love of movies; it also shaped my life. It helped me understand who I was, forgive the parts of myself I struggled with, and eventually learn to love them.