breakups and bullshit

how my first film screening went

I called this pub Lonely Girl for kind of a specific reason. My ex used to call me Eleanor Rigby, he said I was always complaining about being lonely. This was in high school.

Fast forward to my adult life. I was hosting a screening for the first movie I directed and produced called, “I’m Doing My Job”, a documentary following the lives of 6 South Asian and Black female emergency medical physicians throughout the pandemic. The screening was in NYC, where the film was shot.

I mean it should have been one of the best nights of my life. Look at those legs. I don’t remember what I said before and after the film.

I think I was reeling from my breakup.

I had just broken up with someone I had been dating 4 years. It should have been 2 years. I digress, but I don’t know maybe that’s important information.

I was so excited to premiere a film that was primarily about South Asian women, about NYC, my home for 9 years, and to do it in a fabulous studio in Brooklyn for my friends and family and for the 6 subjects, who by the way didn’t see the film until that day with everyone else.

I had spent 2 years on this film. It took everything I had to crowdfund from my community, to film in March 2020 when everyone else was making sourdough bread, to teach the women to film themselves in the hospital when I couldn’t go in myself, to find a production company in Brooklyn to fund post production and get us into the festival circuit, to be just vulnerable enough with these women that they poured their hearts out to me over Zoom and on camera, but just strong enough that I could discern the best stories.

Our romantic relationships often define who we are. My ex-boyfriend - and his family - had watched me take this film from ideation in the early throes of the pandemic to completion at a time when we are all trying to dissociate from what happened, what we just lost.

In the last few months of our relationship, when the slow drip of disconnection compounded into something more definitive, a decision. A decision that pushed me out of my apartment, that pushed our dog that we got together into his arms a little tighter, simply because she loves him more, that forced my to live a lesser quality of life simply because being single is expensive as fuck, especially in a city like LA, was all a lot to handle when I was also expected to bring the energy into the room.

I felt lonely.

“Where’s <insert ex’s name here>?” people asked.

“We broke up.”

No follow up. No time.

I made the decision, and now I was putting myself on display while trying to process it all at once.

I don’t know where I am going with this. Maybe that’s ok.

The Lonely Girl