Sarah Jayne Brown is a Black-Jewish writer-director based in Los Angeles whose work explores the intersections of desire, identity, and emotional survival. Her storytelling blends dark humor, surrealism, and psychological depth, often centering messy, magnetic women who live on the edge of their own undoing. She is currently spearheading an Indiegogo campaign for her upcoming short, Unicorn’s Dilemma, which is based on lived experience and serves as a proof of concept for a feature-length project about the dangerous contradictions inside “liberated” relationships. Sarah’s background in independent film, and trauma recovery deeply informs her perspective as a filmmaker. She is especially interested in crafting stories that speak to underrepresented Black, queer and bi+ women, survivors and anyone navigating the blurred boundaries between fantasy and reality. You can follow her on Instagram here.
There are times when I loved dating couples. It was like dopamine on tap: two people with different energies showering you with attention, making you feel desired and cared for. It can make you feel like a rockstar, a princess and the star of your own variety show, all at once.
But there were also moments when I noticed something unspoken. A woman going through the motions as she verbally agreed to an arrangement with her partner, only to freeze at the sight of him flirting with me, or worse, being physically intimate.
And sometimes, after walking away from these two people with my freedom intact, I’d realize the grass wasn’t always greener on the other side. Sometimes it was just covered in dog shit. I was a pawn in a couple’s failed attempt to save their relationship. Couples counseling didn’t work for them. Neither did casting the bisexual woman as an emotional support girlfriend for the wife, and a fantasy for the husband.
Believe it or not, the last throuple I was a part of started as the best throuple I had ever been in, before it eventually became the worst.
They were both older and more successful, at least financially. She had Farrah Fawcett hair and a smile like Brooke Burns, and he looked like a lumberjack version of Adam Scott. Both of them were genuinely eager to invite me into their arrangement; more importantly, the Farrah Fawcett-Brook Burns hybrid actually wanted me. She was attracted to me, not just trying to please her male partner.
At the time, it didn’t seem like I was making the same mistake again. If anything, it felt safer. More equal. But it was actually a more dangerous mistake.
It felt like one final job, the way people in the mob talk about their last crime before trading it in for a clean life. I’d have my fun with them, then move to Los Angeles to pursue my dream of being a filmmaker.
What I didn’t anticipate was the shift that happened after I moved. Though we were separated by 400 miles, lumberjack Adam Scott and I stayed in touch, but the way he acted toward me changed. I had assumed that a man who’d met me in a kink club, who had multiple female partners, who made his whole personality being a part of the lifestyle scene, would not have a violent outburst when I told him an adorable guy I met on Hollywood Boulevard invited me to see Infinity Pool. But I was wrong.
I knew it was a neon red flag. But seeing his tantrum via text message, intellectually realizing the absurdity of it all, caused me not to take it seriously. I minimized his behavior, not realizing it was just the preview of what was still to come.
bell hooks once wrote that men often embraced sexual liberation when it served their desires, but resisted it when it threatened their control. “Liberation was conditional: it ended the moment it demanded emotional vulnerability, accountability, or absolute equality”.
With this man, I didn’t just read about that contradiction. I lived it.
His most disturbing contradiction came the weekend of Valentine’s Day. When he visited me that evening from the Bay Area, he greeted me with a Hallmark card signed, “I Love You, Sarah Jayne.”
The next day, he sodomized me. I asked him to stop twice.
The second time, he coldly said, “Come on, I’m already in.”
My body went numb. I stared at his reflection in the sliding mirror closet. His eyes were cold and soulless, and he didn’t even notice that I had already floated outside of my body. I was somewhere else in the room, watching this horrific scene unfold as if it were a film I hadn’t agreed to star in.
After that weekend, I distanced myself from him. But I didn’t take a break from dating. Three days after I ghosted him, I went on a date with another man. It wasn’t until a month later that I realized he was just like him.
And then I was stuck with myself: a very fragile, traumatized, emotionally dysregulated version of who I used to be.
Throughout the day, I would have crying spells. I hyper-fixated on my failures, to protect myself. I obsessively researched the signs to look out for, trying to prepare for the next person who might be like him. I had nightmares where he showed up as a sleep paralysis demon.
I wish I were making that one up.
But I also remember the day I walked into a Walgreens with my AirPods playing N.E.R.D.’s “Sooner or Later” on repeat.
It was early in the morning. It was April.
I bought a five-subject notebook, rhinestones, labels and a Sharpie. I labeled the notebook Unicorn’s Dilemma and decorated it with multicolored gems.
To survive, I would have to become an Alchemist, a person who incorporates alchemical principles into their art, to transform and transmute trauma. I was entering the alchemical phase of putrefaction. This is the stage where everything must decay, where the old self withers so that something new can eventually emerge. I had no idea what I was doing. I just knew I had to write.
And I started writing obsessively.
I don’t really recommend that anyone dive headfirst into writing their magnum opus after suffering a trauma. But I’m built differently.
My origin story gave me the ability to survive and even thrive in the midst of chaos.
When I wrote the first draft of Unicorn’s Dilemma, whether I was home, at Horror Vibes Coffee, or sometimes at a networking event (where I should have been connecting with other creatives, instead of writing), I often broke down crying.
It was cathartic. It was a way for me to heal by going through it. And it was a messy, stubborn exercise in trying to make sense of it all.
In Alchemical terms, I was deep in calcination, otherwise known as the burning away of the ego. Every crying spell, every obsessive rewrite, every moment of shame or fury or numbness was part of the fire. The version of me who thought she could intellectualize her way out of the trauma had to go. The version who thought she was overreacting. Who still clung to the fantasy of being desired, not destroyed.
Writing Unicorn’s Dilemma didn’t just help me process what happened. It burned away the parts of me that were too loyal to my own pain.
During this time, I went through three different therapists.
– One whose schedule conflicted with mine.
– One who acted as if struggle love was normal.
– And then one who could name it. Who recognized the abuse for what it was. Who helped me understand that my body had gone into freeze mode, and that my trauma responses didn’t make me weak or broken.
This was the separation phase, when I began to sort what was mine from what was done to me. What beliefs were internalized to survive. What truths I could finally look at head-on.
After finding the right therapist and completing the first draft, I had to step away from Unicorn’s Dilemma. My nervous system was shot, and I needed to rebuild my spirit.
I found the right medication. I forgave myself. I learned how to set boundaries without shame.
This time, I could see it clearly, through the eyes of Sarah Jayne Brown the artist who survived, not Sarah Jayne Brown the victim still defined by her trauma. This was the conjunction, the point in alchemy where opposites meet and something new can begin. I was reintegrating. No longer writing from the wound, but from the scar.
It’s been more than two years since I bought that notebook.
Now I’m proud of the work. Proud of the process. Proud of the mess.
That’s coagulation. When you’ve made something solid and real from all the chaos. A new self, a new voice, a new body of work.
I used to think my story was too niche. But now I’ve seen people laugh and cry while reading Unicorn’s Dilemma. I’ve watched them see themselves in its main character, Venus.
There were times when I truly enjoyed writing Unicorn’s Dilemma.
There were times when it was excruciating, genuine effort, like digging your hands into the soil and pulling out the weeds, making space for something beautiful and valuable to grow.
That’s the magic of alchemy. It doesn’t erase what happened. It transforms it into something useful. Something that can’t be taken away.
