The Space That Let Me See My Strength Clearly

On this day, I felt strong, capable, and smart. I felt like a hero.

My acting friend Ryan asked me and another actress friend, Kelly, to help create a visual storyboard for a screenplay he was developing. Kelly and I were cast as a duo of heroines set to dismantle the power of a community leader with a dark thirst for control. Ryan’s character was the wild card -shamelessly self-serving, driven do whatever he could in his pursuit of absolute power.
 
We built our costumes for this steampunk world, and he brought in our friend Mary from Queen Elizabeth Photography. On the day of the shoot, we drove out to an old ghost town on a cold, windy, almost snowy afternoon in late October.
 
Ryan imagined a story where goodness was not passive -it was strategic, embodied. Kelly and I became something like steampunk Robin Hood figures: capable, alert, and decisive. During the shoot, we crept, ran, carried our weapons, planned and executed strategies, and searched for clues until we finally confronted his character -sneaky, charismatic, and deeply troubled.

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Our victory over him wasn’t an end. It became a pivot point… where his character shifted, chose something different, something vulnerable.
 
Battling the elements, our photographer directed with precision and openness, giving us space to explore while shaping the frame. By the end of the day, we had created a series of images that became a working foundation for Ryan’s screenplay.

This photo shoot stayed with me for quite a while in my artistic, and also human, reflections.
 
At first, it was the energy of it -the physicality, the focus, the sense of purpose in every movement. Maybe it was something about the ghost town itself… a previously lively space now emptied of all that made it work. Later, something else surfaced. I started to notice what felt different from a few other projects.
 
Watching Ryan build this story, I realized he wasn’t positioning strength as something reserved for one type of character. Through collaboration he allowed the women to lead, to strategize, to win -and he allowed his male character to be flawed, to unravel, and ultimately to shift into growth and vulnerability. Nothing felt forced. There was just a sense of… isness.
 
That stayed with me.
 
I found myself thinking about how often strength and vulnerability are filtered through masculine and feminine pre-determined expectations and how we subtly accept or reject them depending on who is expressing them. Here, in this small creative space, those expectations felt quieter.
 
It made me recognize something I hadn’t developed words for before now: how impactful it is to be in a creative environment where strength is not questioned, only met. Where it doesn’t need to be justified or softened or classified by gender.
 
This experience began to put more words to something that was in me.
 
I felt a renewed appreciation for my own sense of heroism, not in a grand or performative way, but in the quieter, consistent ways I show up in my daily life. The willingness to act, to stay engaged, to think, to keep moving toward something meaningful.
 
I also started to understand being a “hero” more deeply. Not as a role or an image, but as a practice… something lived and inhabited internally.
 
In the quiet corners of myself, I could feel it more clearly: a hero is someone who continues to reach and fight for their own soul light, even when it would be easier not to. Someone who chooses to move forward, with intention -again and again- in ways that serve both themselves and others.

It wasn’t that I became a hero -it’s that I was finally allowed to fully occupy that space.
 
What surprised me is how something as simple as this collaborative photo shoot added words and understanding to make this perspective stronger. It reminded me strength, vulnerability, and what we might call “heroic” qualities aren’t owned by any one kind of person.
 
Heroic qualities emerge when there’s simply an open space for them… when people are willing to collaborate, meet each other as is, and accept that isness that exists in each other.​

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Thanks to my gracious writing editor: Rachel Riitano