Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl, I was trying.

Don't wait around for someone else to tell your story. Do it yourself by whatever means necessary.

I felt like I was a writer, and I just thought filmmaking was the best way for me to express that, because it allows me to embrace the visual world that I love. It's allows me to interact with people, to be more social than fiction or poetry, and it felt like the right way for me to tell the stories that felt pressing to me.

It's not brave to do something that doesn't scare you. Performing in sex scenes that I direct, exposing a flash of my weird puffy nipple, those things don't fall into my zone of terror.

I'm not jealous in traditional ways - of boyfriends or babies or bank accounts - but I do covet other women's styles of being.

Like Summer Sisters comforted me just because I was like, okay things I've seen with my own eyes are not so terrible, and even though I knew adult gay people and had absolutely no issue with it. And I just couldn't articulate what made me so uncomfortable about the space that I shared with my friends becoming a sexual space. And it was very healing for me to read that, and feel like it was a part of other friendships, even fictional friendships I admire.

My relationship to eating, my relationship to critiquing my own shape, all of that has changed since I've started viewing my body much more as a tool to do my work.