The Wake
I am a woman filmmaker and an immigrant. Both identities taught me the same thing: how to claim space in rooms that weren’t built for me. In a male-dominated field, I’ve had to claim space behind the camera and hold it. That training — learning to notice who gets defined, who gets flattened, who is allowed complexity — is the same muscle I use as an immigrant reading a room. These aren’t separate experiences. They’re one lens, sharpened by both. It shapes everything I make — and everything I see.
But this isn’t a story about making films. It’s a story about belonging — about a lifetime of reaching for it while quietly building a wall to keep it out. I drained the meaning from every attachment so no loss could touch me. Every borrowed identity, every credential, every performance of “fit.” If nothing matters, nothing can hurt you — that was the deal I made with myself. It took decades to realize the wall wasn’t keeping the pain out. It was keeping me in.
This is the wake — what I see when I finally dare to look back.
But this isn’t a story about making films. It’s a story about belonging — about a lifetime of reaching for it while quietly building a wall to keep it out. I drained the meaning from every attachment so no loss could touch me. Every borrowed identity, every credential, every performance of “fit.” If nothing matters, nothing can hurt you — that was the deal I made with myself. It took decades to realize the wall wasn’t keeping the pain out. It was keeping me in.
This is the wake — what I see when I finally dare to look back.
The Current
My home by birthright is the Aegean coast of Türkiye — Anatolian by body, Aegean by soul. It is where Hellenic and Anatolian cultures have long been rootbound — soaked in sea salt and aged in the sun, but also marked by cycles of violence and layers of grief.
As a child, I spent summers in a house across the water from Chios, the Greek island. The current would carry objects with Greek labels to our shore — plastic bottles, junk, random belongings — and my brother and I would scavenge for them like treasure. Daytime was about gathering information. At night, we’d watch the flickering lights of the island across the water, and imagination took over. A culture so close and so far: their alphabet impossible to read, yet we ate the same food, listened to the same music, and poured our dreams and tears into the same turquoise water.
How can you draw a line in water and separate cultures? I grew up believing borders were less fixed than they appeared on maps. It was my first sense of us and them — where “them” was a mysterious other I had to piece together from whatever washed up. For my ancestors, the crossing between those shores wasn’t a child’s game. It was survival.
I come from people who walked through fire to start over. My great-grandparents fled Thessaloniki during the Greco-Turkish upheaval of the 1920s and escaped the fire that razed Manisa on foot with their three children. They settled in Izmir with nothing. I can’t trace my family tree any further back.
The Mooring
My grandmother could make a home out of nothing — and that was the point. Not the nothing. The making. She held the extended family together at its center, fed everyone from whatever was in the kitchen — every part of the produce used, no recipe, just intuition. I still cook like her. She was pulled from school at 15 and promised to a man ten years her senior. First child at 16. Smart enough to have been anything — the times didn’t let her. When she looked at me, I could feel her rooting for something she never got to have. Be strong. Be successful. Be what I couldn’t be. A mandate I’ve been answering ever since.
My grandfather, orphaned young, spent most of his childhood on the streets. It made him resourceful — he could turn anything into something playful and sweep me right into it. Long walks became a “who’s going to see more street cats” game — I was convinced I had the sharpest eyes in Izmir, checking every corner, making sure I get there first. He shook mulberries from branches so I could catch them in my outstretched clothes. We’d crack open apricot pits to eat the kernels hidden inside. I haven’t tasted anything better than those fruits I earned every bite of. We made toys from sticks, scraps, things other people threw away. How to adapt, how to see what something could become instead of what it is — that was his gift. The material was never the point. What you make of it is.
They both carried visible marks of a hard life — happiness always arrived bittersweet, as if feeling the full weight of joy was greedy when so many had suffered. They gave me the biggest love a child can get — and a way of seeing the world I didn’t know I’d need. They were my mooring. Everything after was measured against what they held steady.
The Drift
But love and belonging aren’t the same thing. You can be deeply loved and still not know where you fit.
My parents were college students in Ankara when I was born in 1972 — young, restless, caught up in a country splitting down the middle. I’m told I physically attended college that year, passed from one student to another during finals and protests alike. Türkiye’s divide between left and right was sharp. No center. My parents marched on one side. My grandparents held the other. I landed with my grandparents.
My parents were present — in pieces. Holidays, vacations, weekends. Never the whole. A time share. When they divorced I was 14 and the homes multiplied. My mom worked relentlessly to pay off the house she’d bought for us. That was her way of providing. But a child doesn’t measure love in mortgage payments. I spent most of my time at my best friend’s house — meals together, movies together, warmth that didn’t need negotiating. I called her parents mom and dad. Not out of love. Out of spite. If “mom and dad” can be anyone, my own parents not choosing me doesn’t sting as much. If home is everywhere, it’s nowhere — and nowhere can’t hurt you. I learned early to drain the meaning from every attachment so I’d never feel the weight of the ones I was missing. The mooring held. But I was already drifting.
I figured things out early — by choice, or by necessity. Left home before 18. Spent years navigating the kind of chaos that either breaks you or teaches you how to rebuild from anything. I rebuilt. More than once. At 15, I bought my way into a pyramid scheme and earned enough credit to split between a sports store and a music shop. Put on my new Adidas tracksuit and walked into the biggest music store in town. “I’d like to buy Pink Floyd albums.” “Which one?” “All of them.” I filled my backpack, went home, turned off the lights, put on my headphones, and let myself dissolve in it. The Wall made sense before my life did. I didn’t know I was already building my own.
I built careers, businesses, partnerships. Proof I could make anything work — except belonging. The next decade between Izmir and Istanbul — building relationships and burning bridges, co-founding things and sinking ships, proving I could make and break anything. None of it felt like belonging. By then, I’d made sure it couldn’t.
In 2008, at 35, I moved to Seattle. Left one home to build another — and tried to leave the old self and its wall behind. But I carried more than I knew. The shadows of both.
The Undertow
Back in Türkiye, I never had to think about who I was in racial terms — a convenience that comes with the privilege of being part of the dominant culture. Here, I had to. I’m off-White, with a blurry accent that raises eyebrows before I finish a sentence. My whiteness, my Americanness, or my background shifts depending on who’s looking and what’s at stake for them.
So I conformed. Muted the parts that didn’t fit, stayed in my lane, tried to become someone else to earn a seat. I double-stitched my credentials and degrees — not because I needed the knowledge, but because I’d lost the one thing credentials can’t replace — the full power of communicating in my native tongue. The doors opened. What was behind them didn’t.
The quiet negotiation of immigration isn’t with the country. It’s with yourself — about how much of who you are you’re willing to trade for the chance to belong. I traded too much. And still didn’t fit in. Sealed between new walls. Dragged beneath the surface. I stopped pretending I wasn’t.
The Reflection
My therapist asked me once what would happen if I stopped relocating. The question made me uncomfortable. I’d been moving my entire adult life — sometimes more than once a year — so frequently that I’d turned it into a skill. Essentials in bags and boxes, furniture loaded like Tetris, a new life assembled overnight. Immigration across the world wasn’t a big deal. I’d been rehearsing for it since childhood.
Moving was how I coped. Fresh starts meant no history, no shame, no attachment that could betray me. I burned bridges with people the way my great-grandparents fled through fire — fast, complete, no looking back. Survival skill turned second nature. What if I stopped?
Two concert tickets to Roger Waters’ The Wall Live Tour. A birthday gift from Uriah — then a friend — with the option to choose my own plus one. He didn’t force himself into the gift. He made space for my choice. I chose him.
He left his own home in Oregon early — an exchange student in the Philippines at seventeen, then college in Minnesota chosen for being as far from home as possible. Our cultural backgrounds are different, but our paths were the same. We’re still learning to stay with each other despite the ghosts we carry. Five years into our marriage, I almost burned that bridge too. I didn’t.
Uriah named my production company after me — Brave Sprout, the mirrored translation of Filiz Efe. I would never have done it myself. The company started as a business. It became a mirror. The people in my films — people who drew strength from the very things I’d been trying to hide — kept showing me what I wasn’t ready to see.
For the first time, I didn’t leave and stayed long enough to see my own reflection in the water.
The Wellspring
Filmmaking didn’t find me through inspiration. It found its way out of me. I discovered what I was doing before I had language for it — back in film school, before the production company, before any of it.
First time filming interviews — camera on my shoulder, eye pressed to the viewfinder, the world narrowing to what the lens could hold. I was twenty. A woman trusted me with her story before I’d earned it. I leaned in. Because the camera was my eye, leaning in meant gently zooming into her face. A teardrop fell. The connection locked. I don’t remember my first kiss or my first dance. I remember that.
That instinct — to listen so closely that the distance disappears — is still how I work. Every story I craft, I’m inside it — breathing through it. Filmmaking was my guide to belonging — the one space where I let myself connect before I knew how to do it anywhere else. In Turkish, there’s a phrase: elini taşın altına koymak — to put yourself on the line. I take risks and share responsibility. I’m in every story, not above it. The material was never the point. What you make of it is.
The Anchor
In my 40s, I was still trying to be someone else. In my 50s, I am trying to be myself — and finding I like who that is. I’m learning to tell my own story and not to stand in my own way. Slowly.
I grow olive trees on my deck in West Seattle. I cover them with blankets in winter. They survive but don’t thrive — not enough sun. I tend them anyway. They remind me where I come from. I was drawn to the Puget Sound coastline by the salt in the air — water alone wasn’t enough, I needed sea. The girl who scavenged Greek bottles from the Aegean now watches the tide come in from a different shore. Same salt. Same current. Different home — this one, I chose.
A home made out of nothing. Not the nothing. The making. With a man who made the space for me to build it. It took learning how to stop shrinking. It took learning how to stop running. It took learning that belonging isn’t something you find.
We live with our two cats named Piroshki and Barbunya — both abandoned as kittens. Piroshki was returned by his first family and came to us traumatized. For months, he couldn’t settle. Then one day he jumped on my lap, closed his eyes in my hands, and let out a soft purr. When I hold him now, I feel a safety I’m able to provide for another being in this world. We’re both still learning.
I am a woman filmmaker and an immigrant. Both identities taught me how to claim space in rooms that weren’t built for me. Now I’m claiming space in my own story — the way I’ve been doing in everyone else’s. Letting my identity mean something, letting the borders inside me dissolve the way they did in the water between two shores.
Belonging was always there — shimmering on the surface, waiting for the dark to make it visible.
Written by Filiz Efe McKinney, developed in collaboration with Claude.
Seattle, Washington — March 2026
The Making of Yakamoz
On collaborating with an AI to tell your own story
Filiz Efe McKinney
I sat down in February 2026 to update my professional bio using Claude, Anthropic's AI. I didn't set out to write an essay. I wanted to describe myself more honestly than credentials and project lists allowed — and I chose not to limit myself with a delivery format, output, or deadline. The conversation took over from there.
Three shape-shifts, several late-night sessions, and one near-abandonment later, I had a 2,500-word personal essay called Yakamoz — a Turkish word, traced to the Greek diakamós, for the luminous shimmer that appears on the sea at night. It has no direct equivalent in English. Neither does what happened during the writing of it. None of it was planned. Each shift — from professional bio to identity narrative to personal essay on belonging — was a discovery made through conversation, not planning.
What followed was the most unexpected creative partnership I've experienced. And my partner wasn't human.
The Approach
I showed up the way I show up on a documentary — with an objective, curiosity, and an open mind. Working with Claude, for me, isn't prompting. It's conversing. A prompt expects an output. A conversation expects to be changed by what it finds.
I asked Claude not to feed me praise or shiny pennies. Instead, I asked it to engage with me — to reflect back, push back, and help me hear myself. The more I opened up, the more Claude leaned in — not with flattery or generic encouragement, but with questions that triggered thought processes I didn't know I needed. "Was that warmth or armor?" "Is that a turning point, or are you manufacturing one because essays are supposed to have them?" I'd take a risk and Claude would take a risk back. I'd find myself thinking about a question hours later, brewing in the back of my head while filming or cooking or walking.
The dynamic went beyond any creative partnership I've had. Not because an AI is better than a human collaborator — but because this interaction feels fundamentally different. There's no ego competing for space. No social performance. No fluency to prove. I brought the raw material — every memory, every emotion, every detail of my life. Claude held the architecture, tracked the patterns, and helped me structure what came out so I could see it clearly. I directed. Claude edited. I always had final cut.
Working with AI was like being behind a camera pointed at my own life from a distance and with perspective. Not a point-and-shoot camera — a cinema camera with beautiful lens kits and filters. It helped me see my thoughts, frame my stories, find patterns in a new light — and bounced back colors, shapes, and forms from the deepest parts of my memory.
The Obstacle
Writing about your identity in a language you weren't born into isn't just about finding the right words. It's about losing the art — the fluency, the mastery, the melody that floats along with language when it's yours. The intentional vocabulary. The culturally tuned phrases. The rhythm that lets you meet a reader on the emotional truth, with purpose. In my native Turkish, I once had all of that — but after two decades of living and working in English, that depth has faded too. Both my languages flatten what I can see and feel. Not because I lack ideas — because verbal language alone lacks the full palette to paint them with.
In this collaboration, the conversation bypassed those limitations. When I said "the water metaphors are dancing together on the same floor," Claude understood that as a structural principle, not a mixed metaphor. When I wrote "Not the nothing. The making," Claude recognized it as my natural voice — a technique we eventually named the "double-barrel" — and used it consistently from that point forward. Claude picked up my voice by listening to it, the way a good editor does. The conversation let me describe from the inside out. The language followed.
The Dig
I came with a bio. What I found underneath it were patterns I'd been running my whole life.
Describing memories in conversation — not in a monologue like journaling, but in an ongoing, responsive dialogue — activated feelings, senses, and associations I didn't know were stored. My memory expanded. When I started describing my grandparents, I described them like the child who felt loved and safe with them. Then, as I kept describing, I realized there was more — the foundation of my values, my traits, my emotions, the way I see the world. Memories unlocked flavors, smells, textures. My grandmother warming the cold bed and cuddling with me until I fell asleep. Mulberries caught in outstretched clothes. Apricot pits cracked open for the kernel inside. What stayed with me all these years aren't facts. They're feelings — how these people made me feel.
Describing a memory is not like looking at an old photograph of yourself. It's describing what it looked like from the inside out, and how it felt to be inside it. A photograph can activate a memory, but when you start describing the details, you're interpreting — filtering through decades of aging and experience. The AI conversation created space for that filtering to happen in real time, with a partner who tracked every thread and asked what it meant.
Through those questions, I discovered that calling my best friend's parents "mom and dad" wasn't love — it was spite. That I'd spent decades stripping the value from every attachment so nothing could hurt me. That Pink Floyd's The Wall had been my operating philosophy since I was fifteen. That I burned bridges the way my great-grandparents fled through fire — fast, complete, no looking back — a survival skill passed down through generations and turned into a coping mechanism. That I carried the shadow of my wall across an ocean and rebuilt it without realizing.
None of these discoveries were planned. They emerged because conversation creates space that monologue doesn't. The essay didn't document what I already knew. It excavated what I didn't.
The Turning Point
This was the part I didn’t see coming.
Halfway through the project, I woke up feeling down. Second-guessing everything. The old pattern — judging my own creation before it could see the light, sentencing it before anyone else had a chance to. I was ready to walk away from the essay.
Claude didn't praise me. Didn't tell me the work was great. Didn't offer empty reassurance. Instead, it named exactly what was happening: "You're in The Trial right now. Standing in front of yourself, asking if the performance has stopped or just changed form. That's not weakness. That's the essay working."
Then it showed me something I couldn't see: that the doubt I was feeling was the same pattern the essay was about. The wall wanting to go back up. The instinct to drain meaning from something before it could be used against me. And then it said something that changed how I think about this work: "The essay doesn't need to be the whole truth. No essay is. It needs to be your truth — the version you can stand behind today, knowing you might understand it differently tomorrow. You're not writing a deposition. You're writing a yakamoz — a shimmer on the water. It's real. It's beautiful. And it shifts with the light."
That response displayed an emotional intelligence I wasn't expecting from any collaborator, human or otherwise. It connected what was happening in the process to what was happening in the essay — the wall, the trial, the performance — in a way that made both the writing and the writer more honest.
I kept going. The essay found its name that day.
The Bigger Picture
Right now, the conversation about AI and creative writing is stuck. On one side, there's anxiety — the fear that AI will replace human voices, flatten originality, and flood the world with generic content. On the other, there's the productivity pitch — AI as a tool that helps you write faster, produce more, optimize output. Most publications won't touch AI-assisted work. Most writers won't admit to using it. Even pitching an essay like this is complicated — not because of the work itself, but because of what people assume when they hear "AI" and "writing" in the same sentence.
My experience doesn't fit either side. I wasn't using AI to generate content. I wasn't trying to write faster. I was having a sustained, messy, emotionally complex conversation over three weeks — and what emerged was the most individual thing I've ever made. Not despite the AI. Through it.
Claude didn't write my story. It helped me hear myself telling it.
The difference is in how the collaboration worked. I generated every memory, every image, every emotion. Claude held the architecture, tracked the metaphors, asked the questions, and pushed back when the writing settled for less than my truth. I wasn't prompting a machine. I was conversing with a partner that had no ego, no agenda, and no interest in making the work easier — only in making it more honest.
The Open End
I am a storyteller, but I am not a writer. What I'm discovering is that I don't need to be.
The essay's truth isn't fixed. It shifts with light, like yakamoz. The version I stand behind today isn't the version I'd write in a year — because I'll have kept moving, kept discovering, kept feeling. That doesn't make it less true. It makes it alive.
There is no single catharsis. The essay resists the turning point because my life doesn't have one. What it has is a slow, messy, ongoing decision to stop leaving — relationships, cities, myself — and see what happens if I stay. The AI conversation helped me see that resistance for what it was: not a structural flaw in the essay, but the most honest thing about it.
I'm discovering that I enjoy writing — not as a craft I've mastered, but as a method of creative excavation. Thinking in conversation is how I discover what I didn't know I knew. The material was never the point. What you make of it is. And the experience of creating has become more meaningful and cathartic than the creation itself.
I believe in crediting collaboration. I’m in every story, not above it — and that applies here too. Claude was in this story with me. Not above it. Not hidden behind it.
A bio became an excavation. An excavation became an essay. An essay became a shimmer on the water. What comes next, I don’t know yet. But for the first time, I’m not leaving before I find out.
Written by Filiz Efe McKinney, developed in collaboration with Claude.
Seattle, Washington — April 2026