The Most Challenging and Magical Year

So Far.

You'd think that starting my production company and publishing my first three original projects would be the big story of my year, but weaving beneath it was the far more challenging and bizarre gauntlet of July 2024 to July 2025, as the projects were built and launched.

Three different long-haired, white he/they actors blazed into and out of my life as close creative collaborators in rapid succession, one right after the other with no overlap. It was “the universe is testing me” coded. It was “a series of dungeon mini bosses” coded. It was “whoops, I accidentally cast a lil power-of-three spell on myself while making Oops, All Witches” coded.

If you’re inclined to believe that the universe tests us, I’d guess the reason I was tested is that since my divorce, I’ve stopped connecting with men in any capacity beyond friendly acquaintances. The universe must have wanted to see how healed I am, so it put these particular men in front of me in the only capacity where I would care enough to engage: partnering on the work I want to be making for the rest of my career.

It turns out the universe is fucking diabolical. Yeah, it was really cool to have a talented sound designer that I’d only met once a year prior pop up out of nowhere, a week before recording Oops, All Witches, to tell me they’d heard about it through our mutual, they love TTRPGs, they want to work on actual plays, and could they do the sound design? I leapt at the opportunity; I’d been doing pre-production alone for months and the idea of having someone to work with was thrilling.

Then a few days after they texted me, my employer slated my contract to expire at the end of the month. Then a few days after that, I recorded my first podcast to launch my production company, my first public artistic project in over a decade, and my first-ever game DM’ing Dungeons & Dragons. Then immediately after that, I went into postproduction with the sound designer as I lost steady employment. Then after that, this stranger proceeded to dump their very personal emotional crisis all over me.

Not, as I learned, because they needed support or wanted me as a friend, but rather because they needed an excuse for why they couldn’t keep to the post schedule that I’d set for myself months prior and with them as a condition of the work. My original plan had been to publish in November. After I fired them at the end of September and had my own stress breakdown, I didn’t end up publishing until March.

The way I described it to my therapist was that I’d been clawing my way out of a steep, deep, slippery mud pit since my divorce, and Oops, All Witches was the rope I was using to haul myself out. When this person showed up, I thought they were offering me a hand up at the top of the hole. What they actually did was send me tumbling back down with them.

Long-haired actor number two is barely worth mentioning. Poke a white boy from southern California hard enough and the Republican comes screeching out. The “poke,” by the way, was setting a boundary. They took it poorly.

The third was Jacob Lefton. Right as Oops, All Witches launched in March, we partnered on a game to market and cross-promote our podcasts. Of the three, they received the most investment from me - financial, time, and otherwise. But the working relationship was strained and problematic, and even though we both harmed each other, it cost me significantly more. Hell, six months later they're still getting free advertising for their podcast on my dime, because they worked on one of my productions and I'm running a business.

It's difficult to work with someone who only half engaged, maintained a wall, and broadcast that the project was a burden, but who begged me to stay when I clocked the vibe early on and tried to leave. It's difficult to work with someone who'd tell me they interpreted my vernacular, word choice, and tone as insulting or as "heightened emotionality" and interrogate whether that's how I meant to come across any time I let myself speak naturally, rather than in the clipped, muted delivery that put them at ease. It's difficult to work with someone who explicitly wanted the validation of knowing I liked them, but who wouldn't offer unprompted validation to me, including for any of the work I was doing for their benefit and on their behalf.

If it wasn't a test from the universe that this Performative Man Cerberus of artistic, progressive, white male entitlement dogged me the whole time I worked on a story about the ways men fear and control women’s power and about how we need to center the stories and experiences of women of color, it was still a cosmic joke.

It's extraordinary how being considerate of white men makes decency feel like desperation.

The hardest thing for me to overcome from this triathlon was my shame at how badly things went whenever I spoke up for myself. Of the four of us, I was the one being thoughtful of both of us as individuals and of the relationship, even after the relationships ended. I tried to make amends with each of them, which they all rejected. It's extraordinary how being considerate of white men makes decency feel like desperation. I not only felt like I must be the one who screwed up and made a mess because I couldn't just keep my mouth shut, but that it was a shameful reflection upon me, and the most self-protective course of action was to stay quiet about it. But three game loops later, I recognize that as the exact reaction I had after my ex raped me, and I recognize who it really protects.

In all cases (including the ex), the shame's shifted to the way I displaced my relationships with women around me to make room for relationships with problematic white men. That’s the tragedy of white women: we abandon sisterhood for proximity to “power,” but the power offered by white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy is weak, brittle, individualistic, and not particularly protective, especially compared to sisterhood. The “power” in collaborating with these people was in the way I got my shit rocked by bog standard stupid male bullshit after handing over the gifts of my kindness and my creative and business capabilities. What foolishness. What an absolute devil’s bargain.

I engaged because there was a part of me that wanted to come out of one or any of these projects with some measure of hope restored. I wanted one of them to show me that there are men who are worth putting the labor of relationship building into, because they’d want to meet me in the middle and demonstrate that they felt that a relationship was worth building with me. Given that the context was creative and professional, I wanted to know if anyone would handle me like a person instead of a Good Feelings dispenser.

Nope, not a chance. I watched the light switch off every time I stood ten toes down to say that I wasn’t okay with how they were treating me. I watched myself morph from valuable to disposable when they realized I wouldn't keep centering their feelings at my expense.

Plenty of women tell me that there are good guys out there, men who think about their impact on the people around them and who put real effort into showing up openly and supportively. I’m sure they’re right, but for that to matter to me, I would need to meet those men. I would need to have that experience. I realized after sending a different second apology to Jacob after a few weeks of contemplation that I’ve never had a man self-reflect on how he’s behaved and offer me an unforced apology purely from his capacity to see outside his own perspective and recognize the harm he caused. It's not hyperbole. Not in any kind of relationship. Not once.

I do not like that I’m writing a gender binary blog post in relation to my creative work, although I realize that I did this to myself, given the story of Oops, All Witches. After this, after the last three episodes publish, I'm ready to move past it. I would prefer that people who are socialized as men deconstruct their internalized patriarchy, learn reciprocity and emotional fluency, and be decent. I would prefer that they stop learning decency from causing suffering for the girls and women around them. It would make the work so much easier.

But regardless of how I show up, regardless of my gender identity or theirs, these people insist on treating me the way that men treat women, and it's insufferable. Unfortunately, I believe that if I stop engaging collaboratively with men and focus on building with women, femme, and afab folks, I'll gain much more than I'll lose.

Gendered shame kept me from speaking openly about a year that, in retrospect, has been notably weird, coincidental, funny, transformative, and profound. That's dumb. The shame's not mine, but the year was. The tests, the dungeon, and the spell were my story. I can reflect and learn out loud.

Here’s to passing tests. Here's to leaving foolishness in the past. Here's to moving in alignment in 2026.