The 7 Year Journey Of 'without you'

REALITY BECOMES ART

I always punch myself for not keeping a journal or some sort of memory bank when I was 15-22 years old. Those years for me (like they are for most) were some of my biggest moments of growth, loss, and love. I tend to be very over-nostalgic about the past. Not from a place of regret or wanting to go back, but more or less wanting to experience those highs and lows again. The feelings that you don’t feel anymore. I crave those. On some nights or early mornings I’ll go back through my camera roll from 2012-2015. Reliving these moments…remembering all I can…chasing that very high or sulking in that ultimate low.

Something I’ve thought about for the last 5 years has been the realization that my parents are everything. My role models, my heroes, my team. and they don’t live forever. I don’t live forever. This is all just rented space we share. I don’t come at these thoughts from a place of sadness but rather curiosity. I wonder what it’ll be like when they aren’t here. When I can’t call my mom to just say hello or see my dad pull up in his truck to pick me up at the airport. The curiosity continues as I TRY to imagine what that will be like, but I just can’t.

As a creative, I take these thoughts and write them down. Those thoughts turn into ideas.

Loss is something I’ve always had trouble coping with. I put all my heart into people and partners. So when a person leaves me, willingly or not, I feel like I lose a part of myself. My emotional pie is down a slice.

In 2014 I lost someone in my life. Someone I loved. The first person I said those edgy 3 words too. When I lost that person I felt like a piece of me was ripped out. I have a hard time remembering a lot of things from back then, but I remember getting the news that it was over. To this day I’ve never been so emotionally triggered because I didn’t get a say in this person leaving. It was sprung on me when I least expected it to be. I threw my phone at my wall… shattering it. I took everything in my room that I could break and destroyed it. The one person I would call if something was wrong wasn’t there for me. I had to turn to myself for the answers but I was missing part of myself. In that moment, I had lost it all.

This is where Without You begins.

OUT OF IT

As time has passed, now almost 6 years later, it’s easy to feel almost as if my angsty emotion has leveled out. Even though if I think about it, those emotions still begin coursing through my heart. Without that moment in my life I wouldn’t have left home for Chicago to ‘start over’. I wouldn’t have moved to LA after that, which led me to NYC where I am now. I might’ve of ended up with a terrible life. But even with that mindset, thinking about all of the positive that came from such a lonely experience, it stills affects me for some reason. Those trust issues blend into my own intimate relationships now. I leave because I’m worried about slowing down or not feeling like myself. That episode in 2014 taught me that I’m perfectly fine by myself and for myself. I don’t need another person to complete me. I have myself, my family, my work. That’s all I need, at least that is what I told myself.

From 2015-2019 I sat down every few months and would write down an outline for what I wanted Without You to be. I needed a creative outlet to let out those emotions that I had internalized for so long. We’ll call it creative therapy.

Year after year of writing down ideas nothing would stick. It was just generic ‘boy meets girl, girl breaks boy’s heart’. Nothing fresh or exciting. I didn’t even feel connected to it.

But then, every year I would make a short 20-30 second video with a poem I wrote. These quick sparks eventually lead to Without You.

HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS

In March of 2020 I decided to come home and stay with my parents until it was “safe” to be back in NYC. I thought I would be there maybe 2-3 weeks tops. It was 5 months. During this time of no work, no life, no idea of when “normal” was going to return, I decided to sit down with this film idea and try at it again. This time, I wanted to approach Without You with an intention to tell it from my heart and not some angsty story about a high school breakup. I took many walks everyday just to breathe something other than recycled air. I thought about how lucky I was to be home and with my parents. How lucky am I that I get to spend this indefinite amount of time in isolation with the people I love the most?

As I sat with this concept, I sat with Without You. I told myself, “maybe this film isn’t about loss of a relationship but loss of a parent, loss of unconditional love”.

I typed away attempting to put myself into the “future me”. Someone who just lost a parent and is dealing with the loss of themself, but also someone who has just fallen in love with a girl. Coping with loss while experiencing a new love. All at once. This idea felt so real to me. I’m constantly in and out of relationships and they all begin with me falling deep into love and end with me getting scared of settling down and running away. It never is a slow burn, it’s full speed ahead.

I imagined myself falling for a girl in what some call the “honeymoon phase”, while also suffering the loss of my mom. A dark thought, but something that felt so strong and real inside of me. I felt a burning to keep writing that I hadn’t felt before with this project. I typed out the first draft in a few days and kept going and going and going. I was on fire emotionally, in the best way possible. I never thought that a global pandemic would be the creative breakthrough I needed to gain clarity for the scope of this film.

MAKING THE FILM

As I sat in my high school bedroom in Texas (keep in mind…the same room that sparked this idea 5 years ago) day in and day out, highly caffeinated, and nervous, I couldn’t help but ask myself…How will I know when it’s ready? It’s a valid question. I have 15 pages of thoughts and stories, some of which were my reality at one point or another, that were embedded in my head since I was 18. Now everything was fleshed out, but what happens when I’m on set and I decide it’s not ready?

I returned to NYC in June on the brink of a break-up with my girlfriend and the unknown future of my filmmaking career. I was at an all-time low, but I had this film to focus on.

I sat down and decided to start casting my two leads. I sent out a casting call and expected to maybe get 5-10 people (if I’m lucky) audition for the film. I received over 100. This ignited even more of a fire inside myself. I knew something was going right if that many people responded to the script and wanted their name to be apart of it.

I casted the film with the best actors in the world (Gianna and David) and the film was set to go.

The setting for it was a toss up. Texas, Upstate NYC, and Brooklyn were my options. Some for personal + nostalgic reasons, and others for logistical.

I landed on Brooklyn in September and it was lights, camera, action. We shot 11/03 - 11/05.

I told myself after we wrapped on the last day I would probably be an emotional wreck. I had just let my baby out there, and it wouldn’t be mine anymore. To my surprise, the experience wasn’t emotional at all. I was just focused all 3 days and after we finished I was relieved in a weird way. I thought something was wrong because I felt normal. I felt the same as I did after any other project…but why? This was THE project. So much built up emotion was behind this, did I do something wrong?

I told myself I’d be emotional and that this was THE project – this was MY story. So it would make sense that I would react to it in a very sensitive way. Then, slowly, I realized I let out all the emotions writing it and going through those dark thoughts so that by the time we got to production, my “grieving” period was over.

I had to come to terms that, for the first time, I was upset that I wasn’t… upset.

Instead, I was happy and relieved.

LOOKING BACK

Never in any way did I think it would take me 7 years to get out these angsty high school emotions. Nor did I think it would take shape in more of love story about family, instead of a girlfriend. It’s exciting how your ideas can grow on themselves.

I didn’t make this film for anyone but myself. I used it as a way to vicariously put myself into the life of someone who loses their parent because just like everyone else, I’m not ready for that day to come. I’m not ready to look at my phone and know that I can’t call my mom or dad. I’m not ready to come back to Dallas and have to a call an uber because my dad isn’t there to pick me up. That is why I made this film. For me to appreciate them even more than I already did. I made this film with my own voice… just to speak to myself.

That’s how art should be, not creating for anyone but yourself. However, the beautiful thing about art is that even when it is just for you, I can promise you that someone else will see themselves in you, your ideas, and your thoughts. We aren’t unique. We share the same fears and the same joys. The same getting older and the same rhythms of failure and success. We share being human and ultimately, we end up sharing with and for each other, even when it’s just for ourselves.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

As I look back on this post 5 months later (I wrote it in January) I still agree with the feelings and thoughts from it but some things have changed and I want to have a honest conversation about it.

While conceptualizing this film caused anxiety and stress I never thought after green lighting the edit and being officially “done” it would cause a type of postpartum depression. After finishing this I’ve fallen into a dark hole of creative block and a feeling of being lost. This film was almost a fantasy to me. I never thought I’d make it and I also never thought it would be something I would be so proud of. For the last month I’ve been totally out of the creative cycle and have found myself often filled with fear and dread. Fear of never being inspired again and a feeling of dread that I’ve hit the precipice of my career. Something that I’ve never felt before. I’ve always wanted to say something and use my art as a tool to tell others stories. I have made the honest mistake of putting my identity and soul into being a filmmaker/artist for the last decade. I never separated the human from the creative. For me, being a creative was my contribution to being human.

Finishing this film was like running a marathon for 5 years. Putting blood, sweat, and tears into it. You are so focused on just running and the idea of crossing the finish line never crosses your mind. You are just keeping a pace and chugging along. Until finally, you cross the line without even anticipating you ever would. You drained yourself over it just to cross an imaginary line and have to pick yourself up and move into another race. There was never a time that you slowly pumped the brakes upon approaching the end, nor did you ever see the end in the distance. The high of it all slowly turns into emptiness. You are drained. You’ve been running off fuel from energy, but your tank has been empty the entire time. With the race now past you, you are now left with an empty tank and an empty mind. All of your mental capacity went into this race and all desire to run another one has diminished.

I don’t mean to come off as this depressed 25 year old or someone who feels like they have nothing to live for. If I’m being totally honest if I didn’t have my wonderful friends and family around me I’d be in really bad shape. I’ve been able to talk and cry and laugh (mostly cry) with them all about my experience with this 18 minute film. I never expected something like this to wreck me like it did. I always said this film was therapy for me, to help with the idea of losing my parents but after it was all said and done I now have a bigger fear of losing myself. It’s funny how things work out like that. You create and manipulate an ideal “ending” emotion for a project and it turns out to be something you never expected. All I can say now is that I’m seeking to be refueled and replenished from life. It’s been a really hard the last few months but I’d do it all over again if I was given the chance. Sometimes you have to hit the bottom to see just how beautiful the top looks from down there.

Embrace the darkness because the light will always come after.