Opening the Portal

✨Welcome, Initiates✨

Just me holding a cow skull in front of some boulders. Photo by Jillian Sorkin.

Hi!

You’ve found your way to A Woman Under the Influence—a liminal space at the crossroads of film, mysticism, memory, and the unseen. This is more than a newsletter. It’s a transmission. A secret society for people like me (my sun’s in Scorpio in the 12th house, iykyk), who sense there’s more beneath the surface—of stories, of selves, of the world—and want to know what it is.

I’m not gonna lie, I’ve been wanting to start a Substack for awhile now, but I couldn’t decide what to focus on (film? creativity, the creative process, and how it relates to the occult? what it’s like being a biracial first-generation American woman trying to carve out a sustainable career as a writer/director?) so I kept putting it off. Then I realized that I can let this space evolve into whatever it needs to be. I believe the creative process is a kind of channeling — you open yourself up to something greater and allow it to flow through you. That’s what I’ll be doing here.

I’ll share insights into projects I’m currently working on — starting next week with a post about trying to process intergenerational trauma through your art (spoiler: it’s hard.)

You might also find essays, film meditations, dream fragments, stories about travel (corporeal and ethereal), rituals, or dispatches from the edge of consciousness.

I don’t promise linearity, but if you’re drawn to the mystical, the cinematic, the in-between—then you’re exactly where you’re meant to be.

Here, I follow the current—wherever it leads.

If you’re still reading, you’ve already crossed the threshold.

More soon.

xoxo,

Tara
New posts every Thursday.

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