Fire Breather: The Woman is a Dragon

For three years, I worked as a supervising creative producer at a production company. I loved my team. We were making documentaries that mattered — films that I believed could move the world forward.

Then one day, everything changed.

A new hire arrived, a woman who became my manager’s supervisor. And suddenly, the work I’d known and loved shifted. The focus was no longer on films with heart and purpose. It became about how to squeeze every penny and dime out of the process. And while money matters — of course it does — this shift stripped me of my creative leadership, and came right up against my core values: honesty, transparency, and integrity.

For most of my ten years in the professional world, I’ve been a team player. A leader. Someone who listens, advocates, inspires. But in this new landscape, it felt like every single roadblock imaginable was placed in front of me. No matter how hard I worked, how much I cared, I was hitting walls that this women was erecting in real time.

Eventually, I realized that staying would mean compromising what I believed in. And so, I made the hardest professional choice I’ve ever made: I left. And without a safety net of the next job lined up.

To make sense of it, I wrote a story.

In the story, I find myself in the home of this woman, uninvited. I'm creeping through the dimly lit first story, and I discover that she isn't just a woman. She's a dragon. And as I look closer, I realize she isn’t just one person. She represents something larger: all the women who have climbed the corporate ladder by hardening themselves, by conforming to systems designed by men. Women who have leaned so far into masculine structures of control and competition that they've forgotten the feminine powers of creativity, fertility (life!), flow and connection.

In my short story, The Woman Breathes Fire, I face the dragon. And in the end, the whole house burns down. Because a whole person simply cannot survive if the foundation is made of unequitable and unsustainable values.

It’s a story I’d love to produce one day. But more importantly, it’s a story that helped me understand my own journey. Sometimes the dragon isn’t only an enemy. Sometimes the dragon is a mirror, forcing us to reckon with what we will and will not stand for.

Walking away from that job was terrifying. But it was also liberating. Because it reminded me: I don’t just want to make films that exist. I want to make films that matter.